Jon Foster wrote:
I'm using i386 32bit Linux for most of my development and currently
using FPC 2.6.0. I'm trying to understand how to build FPC for various
scenarios: Cross-compiling FPC for another architecture. Building FPC
crosscompilers and related units so I can compile for them from my Linux
machine. And building new FPC versions.
There seems to be a massive lack of documentation about the FPC build
process and many things I try get me know where. I'll do something like
"make deb" and I get "/bin/cp: cannot stat `logs': No such file or
directory ..." Or I do "make build OS_TARGET=win32 SMARTLINK=YES
DEFAULTUNITS=YES NOGDB=1" and it builds a i386-linux RTL with i386-win32
packages!?!?
I've tried building on I386 Linux, PPC Linux, PPC OSX, just to name the
ones that I remember. I've tried simple builds of newer FPCs, cross
compiling FPC, building crosscompilers and units. Building Debian packages.
Not once have I ever been able to get it to do what I want. There is
obviously a lot of pieces I'm missing from what I've dug up on the wiki,
docs and included text files.
Is there documentation for compiling FPC? Am I just missing it
somewhere? FPC seems incredibly flexible and I'd like to take advantage
of it on some other platforms but so far it looks like that is reserved
for a wizard elite somewhere and nobody is saying how to get there.
The document that is usually cited is
http://www.stack.nl/~marcov/buildfaq.pdf which I think is still
generally valid. I don't know whether this is the only URL, or if it's
also hosted on the FreePascal site.
In all cases the correct compiler to start with is the current one (i.e.
at the time of writing v2.6.4), the makefiles generally check and
enforce this and it is unwise to override it.
Apart from that, and with the caveat that I am not a core developer and
this is probably not an orthodox opinion or advice, for building
natively on Linux (also Solaris, OS X etc.) I simply use something like
make NOGDB=1 OPT='-O- -gl -Xs-' all
That's a very conservative build, with minimal optimisation etc. so that
if something goes wrong a backtrace can be had without having to
rebuild. Alternatively see http://wiki.freepascal.org/fpcup
To get the idea of how bootstrapping and cross compilers hang together,
you might find http://wiki.freepascal.org/Native_MIPS_Systems useful. I
tweaked that a few days ago since I think a couple of steps were in the
wrong order.
--
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk
[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]
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