Re: [MiNT] distro cross-building

[Peter Slegg <p.slegg@scubadivers.co.uk>]

On Mon, 13 Oct 2008 15:33:28 , Alan Hourihane <alanh@fairlite.co.uk> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 2008-10-13 at 10:16 -0400, Mark Duckworth wrote:
> > Miro Kropacek wrote:
> > >
> > >     How would you indicate that dependent packages need updated...
> > >     i.e. we statically link everything to mintlib, mintlib is updated,
> > >     every package would then need to be updated to reflect this
> > >     change...  how would we handle this elegantly?
> > >
> > > Don't know if it's elegant but the idea was to make nightly builds for
> > > every package so this shouldn't be much different. We have maybe 100
> > > packages so this is task maybe for 2-3 hours with cross compiler, right?
> > >
> > Yes but then users can't be expected to download all 100 packages every
> > night because some might possibly have been rebuilt?  Dynamic linking
> > was designed as the best solution to this problem so it seems reasonable
> > that that's what we should aim for ;)
>
> But the problem here, is that FreeMiNT (and MiNT) is designed to be TOS
> compatible. You can take an executable written for MiNT and it should
> (maybe with some restrictions) run on the Atari without MiNT installed
> as well. You can't do that with shared libraries, obviously.
>
> For shared libraries we're talking about extending FreeMiNT with ELF as
> an additional executable format. It's no small feat to add this, but I
> guess do-able if we're willing to sacrifice TOS compatibility.
>
> Alan.
>
>

1.16 will always be TOS compatible but the dynamic linkable versions
won't be. Is that a problem ?

Peter