re: ORBit 0.5.8 Cross-Compile problems...

[Dan Kegel <dank kegel com>]

David Haverkamp wrote
(http://mail.gnome.org/archives/orbit-list/2001-August/msg00019.html):

>       Finally getting around to working on cross-compiling ORBit 0.5.8 on
> to a LynxOS embedded system in our lab.   Has anyone else tried
> (successfully?) to do a cross compile to another system?...
>       In looking at the "configure" script for popt (and probably the
> toplevel for ORBit).    The target case for doing a cross-compile just
> looks at the Solaris libraries....  not the ones in the cross-compiler
> directories.   I'm in the process of looking up the configure.in stuff and
> makefile.am to see what needs to be changed to fix that.   I didn't have
> this problem when I cross-compiled MICO or the gettext library.
> ...it would be handy to have an "extra-libs" or
> some such directory that is at the root package directory level that is
> automaticly added to the "LIBS=" stuff so I can add in the missing
> libraries.

I'm just now trying to cross-compile orbit for Linux on the
ppc405, ppc750, and sh4 processors.  On the x86, Orbit has the
smallest footprint of any mainstream (i.e. not tcl :-) orb we've 
seen, and I have high hopes for it.

Dimi Shahbaz and I are starting by writing a patch to glib2.0's
configure.in to make it really cross-compile-friendly.  
Hopefully our patch will be good enough for the maintainers to accept,
so nobody else will have to go through this in the future.

We're using glib 2 rather than the glib 1.x normally used by Orbit.
Glib 2 uses the latest autoconf, which has lots more support for cross-compiling,
and supposedly it's easy to relink a glib 1 application against glib 2.
(I hope glib 2 doesn't add too much bloat; I may end up doing a little 
surgery to disable parts of it.)

Once that's working, we'll move on to Orbit.

Did you manage to get Orbit working under Lynx?

- Dan