I know some folks have successfully used cross-compilation before. But this was in a distant past. There was some support for it in the configure script; surely you're using that? I believe it lets you specify defaults for the TRY_RUN macros. But it's probably very primitive.
About using distutils to build the extensions, this is because some extensions require quite a bit of logic to determine the build commands (e.g. look at BSDDB or Tkinter). There was a pre-distutils way of building extensions using Modules/Setup* but this required extensive manual editing if tools weren't in the place where they were expected, and they never were. I don't have time to look into this further right now, but I hope I will in the future. Keep me posted! --Guido On 11/7/05, Neal Norwitz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > We've been having some issues and discussions at work about cross > compiling. There are various people that have tried (are) cross > compiling python. Right now the support kinda sucks due to a couple > of reasons. > > First, distutils is required to build all the modules. This means > that python must be built twice. Once for the target machine and once > for the host machine. The host machine is really not desired since > it's only purpose is to run distutils. I don't know the history of > why distutils is used. I haven't had much of an issue with it since > I've never needed to cross compile. What are the issues with not > requiring python to be built on the host machine (ie, not using > distutils)? > > Second, in configure we try to run little programs (AC_TRY_RUN) to > determine what to set. I don't know of any good alternative but to > force those to be defined manually for cross-compiled environments. > Any suggestions here? I'm thinking we can skip the the AC_TRY_RUNs > if host != target and we pickup the answers to those from a user > supplied file. > > I'm *not* suggesting that normal builds see any change in behaviour. > Nothing will change for most developers. ie, ./configure ; make ; > ./python will continue to work the same. I only want to make it > possible to cross compile python by building it only on the target > platform. > > n > > PS. I would be interested to hear from others who are doing cross > compiling and know more about it than me. > _______________________________________________ > Python-Dev mailing list > Python-Dev@python.org > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev > Unsubscribe: > http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/guido%40python.org > -- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/) _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
