Re: [autotools] gtk-doc.m4 - cross compile support

[Alon Bar-Lev <alon barlev gmail com>]

On Sun, Oct 7, 2018 at 3:53 PM John Cupitt via gtk-doc-list
<gtk-doc-list gnome org> wrote:
> On Sat, 6 Oct 2018 at 18:50, Alon Bar-Lev via gtk-doc-list
> <gtk-doc-list gnome org> wrote:
> > What do you think the best way to support cross compile?
>
> I'm not an expert at all, but my understanding is that gtk-doc can't
> really work properly in a cross compiler.
>
> It needs to read the gir file for a project, and the gir file is made
> by both scanning source code and doing run-time introspection. Source
> code scans are obviously fine, but run time introspection won't work.
>
> Rather than trying to generate docs in the target, I build my docs in
> the host and copy the formatted output over.

When cross compiling both the build and host are available for you,
the build is the native compiler and utilities and the host is the
target architecture.
This means that you can run the gtk utilities that are installed on
the build part to generate documentation.
The only problem with this gtk-doc.m4 is that it uses pkg-config to
check for existence and version of the tools, while the pkg-config is
reporting packages installed on the host and not on the build.