Re: Cross compiling texinfo-4.7

[Stepan Kasal]

Hello Mark,

On Tue, Oct 05, 2004 at 02:47:22PM +0100, Mark Fortescue wrote:
> texinfo-4.7 does not cross compile

thank you again for your patch.

I thought about the problem and had some ideas.
Then I looked at your patch; it seems it is very close to my ideas.
I think it needs some more work and then could be integrated to the main
tree.  (I hope to convince Karl.)

If you are willing to work on it, here are some suggestions:

1) I think that the configure script could be switched to a ``tools only
mode'' by an external variable, say TEXINFO_CONFIGURE_TOOLS.
configure.ac would contain
        AM_CONDITIONAL(TOOLS_ONLY, [[test "$TEXINFO_CONFIGURE_TOOLS" ]])

2) I think the call to secondary configure should move from Makefile to
configure.ac.  (Secondary configure must be called with eg.
TEXINFO_CONFIGURE_TOOLS=1 , as mentioned above.)

3) the build_tools nedd not be ${build}, it can be a simpler dir name,
like "tools"

4) Instead of setting --prefix=$cdir, you should redefine the install rule
in the top-level Makefile.am.
Something like:

if TOOLS_ONLY
install:
        : do nothing
endif

5) While building tools, you don't have to descend to all dirs.
I guess the following should work fine (again, in the toplevel Makefile.am):

if TOOLS_ONLY
  SUBDIRS = $(build_tools) intl m4 lib info makeinfo po util doc
else
  SUBDIRS = lib info makeinfo util
endif

6) distclean would be broken.  One would have to use an automake ``hook''
to fix it.  The distclean in the top level Makefile.am should do something
like   rm -rf ${build_tools}

Do you have time and mood to implement this?

Thanks again for your contribution,
        Stepan