Re: [MiNT] Sparemint Coldfire

[Eero Tamminen <oak@helsinkinet.fi>]

Hi,

On Saturday 02 January 2010, Vincent Rivière wrote:
> Excellent. But it will be a lot of work.
> The main problem is that the only compiler for ColdFire is GCC 4.x, most
> SpareMiNT sources are really outdated. As I have already underlined, old
> software often need some minor patches to be compatible with GCC 4.x.
> We would probably have more chances to have a ColdFire distribution with
> Alan's Gentoo which use up to date packages.
> And also, there is the problem that the RPMs can't be cross-compiled...

One possibility for bootstrapping a new architecture and cross-compiling
stuff for it would be to use e.g. Scratchbox2 (or v1) + NFS or SSH-FS mount
& Scratchbox remote shell running on Aranym for transparently running
the configure etc checks natively while doing the RPM building on fast host
machine.

Scratchbox v[1] & v2[2] are made for cross-compiling distros on Linux.
Target distros don't need to be Linux, but for others one needs to do quite
a bit of extra setup work.  I could help there though.

Scratchbox 2:
	http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/sbox2
	http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/scratchbox2
	http://www.daimi.au.dk/~cvm/sb2.pdf

Once the basic utilities have been bootstrapped, others could use just
distcc to do the most resource using GCC stuff on faster machines:
	http://code.google.com/p/distcc/


	- Eero

[1] v1 uses chroot and other tricks to get host tools to do cross-building
     like it were done natively.
[2] v2 uses LD_PRELOAD and some other Glibc specific tricks to do the same.