Getting cross compilation to work.

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

--------
Per Buer writes:


> Right.
>
> One could argue there is a point in building man pages for a specific arch,
> but I'd rather there be just a single version of each man page and that the
> man pages match what is one the web.

I agree.

I dont think we have ever made that an explicit decision, but as
far as I can tell, we are already pretty close ?

All platforms/archs/distros have the same set of parameters, and any 
inapplicable paramters have "#define PLATFORM_FLAGS NOT_IMPLEMENTED" which
causes param.* CLI commands to "neuter" them, for instanc on (s390) linux:

	param.show accept_filter
	200 137     
	accept_filter
		Not available
		[too many blank lines]
		NB: This parameter depends on a feature which is not available
		on this platform.

But the documentation built on that same (s390) linux, has the same
full spiel about that parameter, as the docs built on FreeBSD where
accept_filter does work.

So as far as I can tell, it is only dynamically determined aspects of
the parameters (min/max/default) which vary between platforms and
in the docs ?

Have I overlooked something ?

> If I were starting over, I think I would prefer the doc to say
> > "determined at runtime" rather than contain numbers which may or
> > may not have anything to do with reality.
> >
>
> That is a reasonable stance. I agree.

Anybody else want to chime in ?

> Reasonable. I got the CC trampoline it running last night, but autoconf's
> default error handling is pretty lame. 

Dont get me started... :-)

> ARM on the server-side is becoming increasingly important. It would be nice to
> not have to find ARM hardware or spin up QEMU to build ARM packages.

We have had ARM covered on FreeBSD for ages, initially on a BBB (32bit)
and RPi (64bit) but now on a QualCom "Snapdragon" based Thinkpad.

So far nobody has bothered to set up a RPI with a USB disk to get
linux covered in a similar fashion, even though all they have to
do is run the tools/vco_test.sh script.

(Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, he said knowingly!) :-)

> Also, I find the current setup somewhat offensive. Pretty clever, though.

The goal was to avoid redundancy, which could get out of sync, and
considering how seldom we add or remove params, I'll claim that it
worked.  But yes: Not immediately obvious to the lay observer.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.