Re: Building on RISC OS

On Tue, Feb 03, 2015 at 10:35:06AM +0000, Steve Fryatt wrote:
> On 3 Feb, Daniel Silverstone wrote in message
> <20150203101944.GE6904@somnambulist.local>:
>
> > On Tue, Feb 03, 2015 at 00:43:40 +0000, Steve Fryatt wrote:
> > > NetSurf certainly can be built on RISC OS, but I'm not sure if there are
> > > any active developers who actually do it on a regular basis. I build on
> > > Linux using the GCCSDK cross compiler, as it's a lot faster and comes
> > > with better support for source control and the like.
> >
> > We make no effort at all to keep it buildable on RISC OS -- for example we
> > use perl in various places and our makefiles assume a proper POSIX style
> > shell.
>
> I stand corrected. It certainly used to be possible, as I did it a few
> times back when I started looking at the RISC OS front-end; I stopped very
> quickly because it was slow, and never bothered to look again because cross
> compilation worked much better.

Yes; I'm fairly sure we stopped trying to support building on RISC OS
when it became clear that noone was doing so :)

Looking at git logs, the BUILDING-RISCOS file was removed over a year
ago with a commit message indicating that native RISC OS builds have
been unsupported since 2013 (although my recollection is that no real
effort was made to keep it building on RISC OS for a long time before
that).

So it's very likely that you cannot build NetSurf on RISC OS at all
any longer. In fact, thinking about it, the core buildsystem used by
all the libraries et. al., no longer has support for native building
on RISC OS. Additionally, since the transition to git for source control
back in 2012, there has been no way to check out the source tree on
RISC OS, either.

So, all-in-all, you would be far better off cross compiling from some
form of Unix (which is what everyone else, including the CI, does).


J.