Cross-compilers.

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Tue, 2006-07-25 at 09:27 -0400, John W. Linville wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 25, 2006 at 07:28:30AM +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> > On Mon, 2006-07-24 at 15:17 -0400, John W. Linville wrote:
> > > On Sun, Jul 23, 2006 at 08:15:18AM -0400, David Woodhouse wrote:
> > > 
> > > > Does anyone else care? Other than the full set of rawhide architectures,
> > > > what others would we include? Alpha, SPARC{64,}, ARM, MIPS, SH I assume?
> > > > Would anyone volunteer to maintain each of those toolchains? I wouldn't
> > > > really feel happy doing it myself, since when it comes to GCC I would
> > > > only ever be a package-monkey, and not a proper _maintainer_.
> > > 
> > > I think it would be great that have this, for a wide range of arches.
> > 
> > /me thinks there is a common misunderstanding.
> 
> /me thinks what we seem to lack is a common context...
>  
> > A cross-toolchain doesn't target an "arch" - it targets a
> > "target-system".
> > 
> > Such a "target-system" typically consists of an architecture, a libc and
> > and parts of the OS/kernel (sometimes plus further target run-time
> > libraries). 
> 
> Thank you so much for your pedantic nit-picking.

> I was, of course, presuming that the audience of this list would
> be interested in targeting linux.
Well, people had been referring to uclinux, avr/avr-libc, mingw32/msys,
cygwin/newlib, rtems/newlib, bare metal and ... linux/glibc targets.

.. so I am probably not alone with my perception.

> But, at least I provided you an opportunity to show how much smarter
> you are than the rest of us -- you're welcome.
It's just that cross-compilers is a subject I work on for almost a
decade and am feel embarrassed when people start talking about "mips"
compilers when they actually mean "mips-linux", "mipsel-linux" or
"mipseb-linux" targets.

Ralf