[Scratchbox-users] Building from source...

[K. Richard Pixley]

Riku Voipio wrote:

>Timo already pointed to the presentations, that hopefully manage to
>clear the picture - If not, we'll gladly take hints howto describe
>scratchbox to people who have never heard about it :) We have been
>using it for so long that it sometimes hard to see things from
>outsiders pov.
>  
>
Well, ok.  The first thing I tried to do in scratchbox didn't work, 
namely, building a "native" emacs using the HOST compiler so that I have 
a reasonable IDE available.  Scratchbox has no /lib/libc, no /lib/crt*, 
etc, so emacs can't build.  I don't really want to hack emacs for 
scratchbox because I think those are throwaway changes that shouldn't be 
in the FSF release of emacs.  But I'll do it if that's the only way I 
can get emacs running.  Unfortuantely, I can't seem to find the right 
libc or crt's.

I tried building outside scratchbox, but, then, of course, I'm not 
linked against a suitable set of shared libraries.

How is this intended to work?

>Building complete scratchbox is not a task for the fainthearted.
>For most projects, Building scratchbox devkits[1] from the template 
>devkit[2] provides enough customizing capability.
>  
>
It's not customizing I'm looking for.  It's documentation.  Since there 
isn't much, I was guessing that the code was suitable documentation 
itself.  But if I can't build from source or run code that I've built, 
then that task is going to be fairly significant, I'm thinking, 
especially if I have to find some way to sandbox a new linux 
distribution just to build it.

So far I don't even understand what a "devkit" is.  I get the idea that 
there are different toolchains, one selects a toolchain and builds a 
"target" out of it.  And that any particular instance of scratchbox has 
one "target", (very poor choice of names, btw), active at any one time.  
But I really have no idea what's involved in a "target" aside from the 
illusion of a cross compiler.  I don't see where the real compiler is 
located, I only see the wrappers.  And I don't really understand what 
else goes into the illusion of a file system which is presented by any 
particular scratchbox instance.

I also don't see where the headers or libraries are intended to be 
located, either when a "target" is active or not.

--rich