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Postings from December 2012
There is outline cross-build support already in perl but this appears outdated. In Debian, I've been working on updating the existing cross-building support from old versions of perl to the current major release. The principle need is to support porting perl to new architectures where an initial cross-build is necessary to provide a platform to prepare a native build environment, not just for perl but for a full bootstrap environment. https://github.com/codehelp/perl-cross-debian The only upstream change is for Makefile.SH : https://github.com/codehelp/perl-cross-debian/blob/master/patches/5.14.2/cross-Makefile.diff This patch was developed for perl 5.12 and I've applied it to 5.14 and 5.16 with successful results. The hard part is that full testing of a cross-build depends on the full distro configuration, so doing a full test of the patch on 5.17 isn't simple. The history of these patches in Debian is recorded in #633884 and the related #285559: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=633884 http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=285559 The principle emphasis is to allow the use of the host perl interpreter instead of miniperl and is activated simply by passing an environment variable to $(MAKE) with the path to the native perl interpreter. To actually make the cross-compile work, the config.h and config.sh files need to be cached from a native build for the same architecture or ported from a similar architecture and for each variant of the perl build: static, debug and shared. This stage is highly configuration-dependent and I've only done this stage for the Debian configuration. This part of the work is done by a separate package - perl-cross-debian - which I will be maintaining for Debian. I'm hoping that the data collected by the long term maintenance of cross-building support for perl in Debian will help others use similar mechanisms for other distributions. I'm willing to provide documentation, if appropriate. Would these changes be suitable for the next perl major release? -- Neil Williams ============= codehelp@debian.org http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/Thread Next