Notices

My first post. Hello, etc.

I could use some advice. For me gforth is a killer app for my nice new n900, weird I know. There is no Maemo deb for this. I'm not averse to compiling my own but while gforth is easy to build it really doesn't like to be cross-compiled. As I see it my options are...

• Use easy debian. That seems like huge overkill when all I'm wanting is one console app.
• Spend ages trying to cross-compile it using my PC as a host. I think that's probably a Sisyphean task.
• Get a simple dev environment (gcc, autotools) installed on my n900 and build it on the device. That's what I did on my beagleboard but it seems that getting such tools on my n900 will break apt-get upgrade? I don't want to do this when I just need the one app.
• Install a deb from another distro (debian). I actually did this and it seemed to work but it was an old version and made apt freak out with complaints about a package that wasn't properly installed (version conflicts etc.).
• Hope some nice person who already has an on-device toolchain installed can spend an hour or so building it (and it's dependency ffcall) and making me a couple of nice debs. I'm not going to ask that, I'm sure you all have other things you would rather play with.... but if someone does it would be great

Thanks in advance to anyone kind enough to answer.

I'm just looking at it now. Looks like you want libffi rather than ffcall.

Ok so I've looked but have to go out. The deps are all in the repo (though you might need to downgrade the quilt version, I didn't check), but.... the debian/rules is made for debhelper version 7, so the rules file will need to be modified, and I don't have the time right now.

But if no-one else has had a crack at it, I'll see what I can do over the weekend.

Ah, I should also say I was talking about the files from Debian sid above.

Thanks for your interest lardman. I'm aware the ffcall interface is now deprecated so yes, libffi is probably a better way to go. I have some old code that uses the ffcall code but it would be pretty easy to update it I guess. For my core interest I don't actually need to be able to interface with external libraries at all, but if I had gforth on n900 then I'd probably want to write bindings for Hildon etc.

Did you try the Maemo SDK (the scratchbox one)?

It's only raison d'être is exactly because cross-compiling is hard. Scratchbox makes it easier by partially emulating the target architecture.

Hey, Forth was the first language I studied on my 8086!

Yes, installed as per the instructions on the wiki. I've had problems cross compiling it for ARM before (archmobile targeting beagleboard). Having said that I'm not an expert on C or the GNU toolchain so perhaps it's just my lack of skill.

Should be reasonably straighforward if someone just wants to alter the debian/rules file from the Debian Sid port so that it uses debhelper 5 rather than 7.

I'll take a look at the weekend if there are no other takers.