Cross-compiling and the gen* native build tools

[Martin Buchholz]

I agree with David that we should use checked-in platform-specific files as
a sometimes-necessary last resort.


On Tue, Feb 4, 2014 at 1:43 AM, David Holmes <david.holmes at oracle.com>wrote:

> On 4/02/2014 7:35 PM, Magnus Ihse Bursie wrote:
>
>>
>> On 2014-02-04 07:46, David Holmes wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> I don't quite follow. What would you hard-code where? At present
>>> either the build platform is the target platform in which case you
>>> compile and run the appropriate generator; otherwise you have to have
>>> a hard-wired version of what the generator would produce on the target
>>> platform if you ran it there. I don't see a third choice.
>>>
>>
>> Let me try again in different words. I'm not sure I'm 100% correct about
>> this, but I'm basically thinking like this:
>>
>> If you want to extract some kind of number, which will then be
>> "hard-coded" into the built product as a constant (e.g. SYSTEM_FOO_VALUE
>> in contrast to getPlatformFooValue()), then you must assume that this
>> value will be constant on all your *target* platforms. Otherwise a JDK
>> compiled on Fedora 8 will break when running on Ubuntu 12.10. So we
>> know, or already assume, that the value selected when compiling for
>> linux_x86 will be valid when running on all linux_x86 platforms. This
>> situation is the same regardless of platform, and regardless of if we're
>> cross-compiling or not. And we also does not expect these values to
>> change as long as we support that platform. (If we find out they do, we
>> need to rewrite the code to extract these values on runtime instead.)
>>
>
> Correct we assume these values are constant for any given OS flavour
> (Linux, Solaris, OSX, BSD).
>
>
>  So we could very well do the same for non-cross-compiles as we do for
>> cross-compiles: generate this file once on the target platform, and then
>> check it in. There's no point in running this tool once for every build.
>>
>
> <sigh> The merry-go-round comes full circle one again. :) The generators
> exist to avoid the need to store platform specific files in the repository.
> Worked "perfectly" till we started cross-compiling. Then we had little
> choice but to allow for the pre-generated file to exist and not run the
> generator program.
>
>
>  The only thing we need to have is a tool to run on demand to help
>> generate these kinds of files for new platforms.
>>
>>>
>>> Note that IIRC the X11 values don't change across platforms, whereas
>>> some of the constants in these files can/do.
>>>
>> As I argued above: If they in fact do, would that not cause a runtime bug?
>>
>
> By platform here I meant OS+arch.
>
> David
>
>  /Magnus
>>
>>