Re: winsup build machinery

[Dave Korn <dave dot korn dot cygwin at googlemail dot com>]

Ralf Wildenhues wrote:

> 2) How can I get winsup to build as part of src, ideally on one of
> {x86_64,i686}-pc-linux-gnu without cross compilation or with the mingw
> cross packages available in Debian?
>
> 3) Is winsup intended to be buildable outside of src, or always through
> toplevel?  Would it be appropriate to use e.g., macros from src/config/
> such as from override.m4 (which is extremely helpful to work around
> Autoconf bugs, smooth upgrade etc.)?  If no, how should such issues be
> handled?

  The only way I'm used to building it is as a standalone checkout, and in my
case natively, although I know that cgf and corinna generally cross-build it
from linux, using I think a ming (rather than cyg) cross-compiler, and
presumably by passing it as CC/CXX_FOR_TARGET at configure time.  I believe
it's meant to build in a combined-tree setup, but I haven't tried it myself.

  So, yeah, config/ is OK, it comes with that and a set of top-level files,
see CVSROOT/modules for the full list.

> 4) The winsup makefiles don't (or don't consistently) contain rules to
> regenerate configure files.  The aclocal.m4 in this tree seem to have
> been generated by some old versions of aclocal, but at least some also
> seem to contain manually written contents, while still containing at the
> very top the note "generated by ...".  That's not good, the comment
> tends to confuse both me and eventual autotools looking at the file.
> So what's the intended, great, master plan for winsup/ and below here?

  I'm sure that's all the result of historical inadvertency rather than any
grand design!  Let's see if we can't fix it.  I'm going to check out a clean
copy and try autoreconfing it with new tools.

    cheers,
      DaveK