Re: GUB build attempt on Ubuntu 10.04.4

[Graham Percival]

On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 06:43:15PM +0200, John Mandereau wrote:
> I've never got so far than this time, as I've managed to complete
> 
> make bootstrap
> make -f lilypond.make bootstrap
> 
> at the price of ugly kludgy operations, so I thought a report would be
> of some interest for GUB hackers.

I don't consider myself to be a GUB hacker, but for the benefit of
the mailing list archives, I'll chip in slightly.  As far as I
understand it, the overall intent of GUB is to use the host system
to complete "make bootstrap", and thereafter not use anything from
the host os.  There's a few instances for which this isn't true
(such as libmpfr-dev), but those are unfortunate bugs.

> I used my Core2 Duo with a desktop Ubuntu 
> 10.04.4 (Lucid Lynx LTS) i386, installed on an external hard disk using
> a virtual machine, and then used by chrooting in it (so in case it
> matters, I'm using a 3.x kernel 3.5.2-1.fc17.x86_64).

All my GUB building is on a Core2 quad, but it's probably with
ubuntu 10.04.3 -- I deliberately stopped updating ubuntu on that
partition a year or so ago, for fears that some bugfix might make
it stop working.  Kernel is 2.6.32-41-generic-pae.

> building package: freebsd-x86::cross/binutils
>  *** Stage: compile (cross/binutils, freebsd-x86)
> Command barfed: cd 
> /home/john/git/newgub/target/freebsd-x86/build/cross/binutils-2.19.1 && make 
> -j4  MULTIOSDIR=../../lib  
> 
> Tail of target/freebsd-x86/log/cross/binutils.log >>>>>>>>
>     make[1]: *** [configure-bfd] Error 1
>     make[1]: Leaving directory 
> `/home/john/git/newgub/target/freebsd-x86/build/cross/binutils-2.19.1'
>     make: *** [all] Error 2
>     Command barfed: cd 
> /home/john/git/newgub/target/freebsd-x86/build/cross/binutils-2.19.1 && make 
> -j4  MULTIOSDIR=../../lib
> <<<<<<<< Tail of target/freebsd-x86/log/cross/binutils.log
> 
> *** Failed target: freebsd-x86::cross/binutils
> make: *** [cross-compilers] Error 1
> 
> 
> It complained about not finding libz.so, although
> 
> $ ls target/tools/root/usr/lib/libz.so*
> libz.so        libz.so.1      libz.so.1.2.3  
> 
> Doing
> 
> aptitude install libz-dev
> 
> allowed to build the GUB package and go further.

IMO this is a "mistake".  (I'm not trying to blame you, and I
completely understand that you were trying to see how far you
could get -- I'd have done the same thing)
If we ever want to dig ourselves out of this technical debt, we
need to tackle such bugs at the source (no pun intended).
Whatever it is that allows some computers to compile
freebsd-x86::cross/binutils happily but not your computer should
be fixed.

I have mixed feelings about writing the above, since I'm not
offering to work on this myself -- with the possible exception of
Waltrop.  Hopefully we can have a session(s) of working on GUB,
wherein you try stuff that fails on your computer, I look at logs
from my deskop that succeded, Mike and Janek and David google for
error messages or read man pages or whatever...

... if we manage to get GUB in the state such that everybody's
computer can complete "make bootstrap", that would be a huge step
forward, and time well spent IMO.

- Graham