Re: [AD] Cross-compiling, and related outstanding issues

[Chris <chris.kcat@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Evert Glebbeek wrote:
> > Why so? Normal users don't need to run make depend (explicitly). And
> > those that would be toying with the dependancies would need to know what
> > they're doing anyway. Indeed, you could even have two targets, 'depend'
> > which builds the dependancy file if it doesn't exist and 'regen-dep'
> > which forces dependancy regeneration.
>
> True; it just feels redundant. In that case, I would argue for adding
> makefile.dep to the library dependencies and having the rule to build it
> read `make depend'

You mean adding $(OBJ_DIR)/makefile.dep to the library target, and 
making make depend automatically rebuild it? Sounds like a reasonable 
comprimise, I suppose.. not fool-proof, but better than how it is now, IMO.

> If I recall correctly, under *nix make depend is run automatically after
> configure (or when running make for the first time).

Now, can you guess where the source of my confusion comes from? ;) 
Having 'make depend' automatically run after configure further pulls it 
away from the "normal" build process. And in actuallity, I'm not sure if 
it's directly running 'make depend' since rerunning configure won't 
rebuild the dependancies if the .dep already exists. If it does actually 
call 'make depend' then I can assume it's a difference in the MinGW 
depend target and Unix's?

> > and the eventual errors you get from not calling it
> > aren't indicative of what the real problem is (who would think missing
> > header files are caused by forgetting to generate dependancy info?).
>
> Well, those particular ones are generated files...

How is someone supposed to know that? I didn't.

> But for that you need to realise that the
> files should be generated during the compilation process. I guess it could
> be documented in the docs for the cross-compiler.

It seems to be MinGW (or non-Unix), not cross-compiling. If I had 
grabbed it off CVS and used MinGW in Windows, I'd imagine I'd have the 
same problem.