FTGL and fedora-mingw

[Erik van Pienbroek]

Chris Thielen schreef op wo 06-10-2010 om 11:14 [-0700]:
> I've never used BC_COMPILER_AND_LINKER_RECOGNIZES personally, but it 
> seems to be used in a few different open source packages, though the 
> compiler.m4 file it comes from seems distributed with each package 
> instead of being part of the system. That compiles a test which it then 
> tries to run, issuing the error:
> 
> checking if compiler and linker recognize -W -Wall -Wundef -Wfloat-equal 
>   -Wpointer-arith -Wcast-align -Wcast-qual -Wshadow -Wsign-compare 
> -Winline -Waggregate-return... configure: error: in 
> `/usr/local/src/ftgl/trunk':
> configure: error: cannot run test program while cross compiling
> See `config.log' for more details.

Hi Chris,

This error seems to be caused by the fact that the macro in question
(BC_COMPILER_AND_LINKER_RECOGNIZES) doesn't support cross-compiling. The
main issue is that it tries to call the autoconf macro AC_TRY_COMMAND.
This macro detects that we're trying to cross-compile and refuses to
perform the command. The AC_TRY_RUN autoconf macro also 'suffers' from
this behaviour. The macro BC_COMPILER_AND_LINKER_RECOGNIZES should
actually be rewritten so that these 2 mentioned macros won't be used
anymore.

On the other hand, as these checks are only to check whether the
toolchain is working correctly it should be possible to drop the
checks from configure.ac without further side effects.

> Thanks in advance for any advice that can be given. I'm also 
> familiarizing myself with the Fedora package maintainer process and hope 
> to add a mingw32-ftgl package to the repos soon -- which begs a separate 
> question: as FTGL's SVN seems to have cross compiling fixed up a bit 
> better than their last release, would it be inadvisable to construct a 
> package for the repos based on SVN? Is it typical to wait for the next 
> point release?

Mostly these kind of decisions are up to the maintainer in question
(that would be you). If you think that a snapshot version is better
because of certain fixes and you're confident enough that the package is
stable enough for regular users I don't see any problem.

Kind regards,

Erik van Pienbroek