Re: mingw32 target broken [cygwin as well] [the saga continues]

[Jeff Sturm <jsturm@one-point.com>]

On Mon, 10 Dec 2001, DJ Delorie wrote:
> Newlib is an operating system, just like solaris or IRIX.  It doesn't
> have to be GNU software for us to support it, it just has to support
> and allow GNU software.

Yeah.  It's just that assuming a non-GNU runtime doesn't seem to fit the
ideology.  (Not that GNU has anything better for embedded use... at least
newlib is free software.)

> And you can't always do a test link with
> cross compilers, because you may not have built enough support stuff
> (crt0, libc, gas/ld) to do so.

But it helps if you do.  When I build a cross compiler, I typically follow
these steps:

1) Install target runtime headers.
2) Build/install cross binutils.
3) Build/install C cross compiler.
4) Build/install target runtime libraries.
5) Build/install other languages (c++, java).

At step 5) I have everything I need for AC_TRY_LINK.  I could
save a lot of time if configure would first attempt to link, falling back
on the newlib guesses.

> > In the target subdirs, "target" becomes "host".
> 
> Yeah, that confuses people, but it does make sense.  "host" is what
> you're building *for*.  For target libraries, you're building for the
> --target, so $host is --target.

That's how I understood it.  But I looked in libstdc++-v3 and libjava...
the former has a configure.target script, the latter configure.host.  So
that interpretation isn't uniform throughout GCC.

Jeff