Re: [MiNT] distro cross-building

[Alan Hourihane <alanh@fairlite.co.uk>]

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.