Le vendredi 03 janvier 2014 à 09:56 +0100, John Darrington a écrit : > During some test builds with the GUIX system, it became apparent that, > for a number of reasons, Ghostscript cannot be cross-compiled like other GNU > software. > > The main issue, is that much of configure.ac seems to be using unusual > constructs which > have not been designed for cross builds. When looking at possible > improvements, I saw this > comment: > > # We MUST NOT use PKG_CHECK_MODULES since it is a) not a standard > # autoconf macro and b) requires pkg-config on the system, which is > # NOT standard on ANY OS, including Linux! > > I think this based on several misunderstandings: > > 1. Although the PKG_CHECK_MODULES is not a "standard" macro, it is shipped > in the pkg.m4 > file with the pkg-config tool which is common on most GNU/Linux OSes > today. > > 2. In fact, the PKG_CHECK_MODULES macro DOES NOT require pkg-config to be on > the system > at the time the macro is processed by Autoconf. It DOES require > pkg-config to be present > when the resulting ./configure script is run by the user, but this is > also true for the > code which is currently in configure.ac too. > > 3. Neither the PKG_CHECK_MODULES macro, nor the pkg.m4 file is ever required > to be present > on the user's system; only that of the Ghostscript maintainers. It is > not required > in order to build or configure Ghostscript; only to bootstrap it before > making a release. > Using PKG_CHECK_MODULES would not add any dependencies for users. > > > In view of this, I think that the work-arounds to avoid PKG_CHECK_MODULES are > doing more > harm than good. Although, I personally, am not a big fan of pkg-config, I > think that if > it is going to be used, then it should be used in the most standard way. > Alternatively > one could avoid pkg-config altogether and use Autoconf's AC_SEARCH_LIBS et > al. macros, but > I think the ghostscript use case is slightly more complex than normal and > this would not be > altogether straightforward. > > > Other reasons preventing cross compiling, seem to include the use of hand > crafted macros > to test for endianess (recent autoconf has a reliable macro to do this) and a > non-standard variable to represent the native compiler (instead of the > standard > CC_FOR_BUILD variable). > > > Would the Ghostscript maintainer accept a patch fixing these issues?
Hi John, If you have some ideas to improve the cross compilation of GNU Ghostcript, I will review your patch with a great pleasure for inclusion in the next (coming soon) release ! Thanks to pointing this problems. Best regards Didier Link GNU Ghostscript maintainer
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