I’ve started to build a few packages that will help me build Perl building on the iPod Touch. Rather than try to cross-compile Perl, I’ve decided to cross-compile what I need to get a development environment going on the iPod itself. It means much longer builds but much quicker total development time — or at least that’s what I’m hoping for.
So far I’ve got flex 2.5.35, libiconv 1.12, libtool 2.2, and m4 1.4.10. They’ve all been pretty easy, with the only hiccup coming when the flex build #defined malloc to rpl_malloc, apparently because the autoconf macros AC_FUNC_MALLOC and AC_FUNC_REALLOC set that up if they detect functions that aren’t GNU-compatible. Unfortunately, there’s no implementation of rpl_malloc or rpl_realloc available, so the build died when the symbols couldn’t be found in the libraries.
For the moment I’m just keeping shell scripts that patch files (where necessary) and run configure with the appropriate arguments. I’ll throw them up on my website tomorrow when I get a chance. I’ll update this entry with the link. If anyone has any advice moving forward I’d love to hear it — especially if I’m going about things the wrong way. I just have no clue when it comes to autoconf and friends.
Update: The first packages are up at https://www.kjwcode.com/project/idev/. More will be on the way.
kjw/code 