[Toybox] GNU autotools are not working

[enh]

On Sun, Nov 3, 2024, 16:29 Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:

> On 11/3/24 13:24, Brian Mayer wrote:
> > This time I sent it correctly to the list!
>
> And my first reply went just to you, because _I_ forgot to manually add
> the list to my reply window. Sigh...
>
> And cutting and pasting the previous reply into a new reply so the
> threading is right (copy outbox copy into drafts folder and double click
> to open editor still works, but I did not find "add reply msgid" in the
> menu pulldowns), thunderbird completely screwed up the wordwrapping. No
> "disable wordwrap" in the pulldown without a plugin, and its "rewrap"
> option does as much harm as good. Oh well, that's software "upgrades"
> for you. I'd learned how/when to work around the old quirks, now they
> force me to use a different UI where they've given the quirks a big stir...
>
> Oh well.
>
> On 10/31/24 20:28, Brian Mayer wrote:
>  > Hi Rob, thank you for taking the time to answer this.
> >
> > Sorry my previous email was a bit obtuse, let me give you more
> > context.
> >
> > I am trying to create an ultra simple meta-distro. The idea is to
> > provide the minimum working system that the user can use to build
> > their things on.
>
> The phrase I've been using is "minimal native development environment":
>
> https://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html
>
> https://landley.net/toybox/about.html
>
> http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2020-July/011898.html
>
> 2013:
> http://landley.net/talks/celf-2013.txt
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGmtP5Lg_t0
>
> 2017:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sk9TatW9ino
>
> 2019:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkJkyMuBm3g#t=1m18s
>
> > So I want toybox, a libc, a shell and a c compiler in it, make is a
> > good addition because most software depends on it. The url for the
> > project is:
> >
> > https://terminal.pink/lin0/tree/index.html
>
> Good luck. I've tried to do exactly this before and share the roadblocks
> I hit if you'd like. Back in 2008 I made a presentation on it:
>
> https://landley.net/aboriginal/downloads/presentation.pdf
>
> Bit stale in places, but...
>
> > Sorry about the certificate, I'm working on it.
> >
> > In order to do this I started with musl. Compiled it, musl ships a
> > musl-gcc wrapper that simply uses a spec file to tell gcc to use the
> > musl libraries and all, which is basically doing what is described
> > here:
>
> I've been very tangentially involved in musl-libc development since
> before Rich even named it or made it public (he was on the busybox list
> and #busybox irc channel back on Freenode back when I was maintaining
> that). I'm the one who convinced him to switch it to a BSD license back
> in 2012:
>
> https://landley.net/notes-2012.html#18-01-2012
>
> Last I checked it works fine. It's the libc in Alpine Linux which is a
> pretty full distro.
>
> >> Modulo glibc's dependencies (perl!) are sad enough that this time
> >> around a musl-libc gcc toolchain was my first pass to establish a
> >> baseline, but
>  >>
>
> http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2024-September/030526.html
> >> strongly implies that it's working fine. Plus, you know, alpine
>  >> existing. :)
> >
> > So for the rest of the project I'm using this compiler, next I build
> > tcc, linux, toybox and mksh. All are ok and work fine, I booted to
> > this system after all this.
>
> So what you built _with_ and the resulting environment you provide
> aren't the same thing.
>
> I have an "airlock step" where the first thing I did was built host
> versions of the compiler and command line tools I intended to put in the
> target, and built everything with them.
>
> I've explained this a number of times over the years, it's probably in
> https://github.com/landley/aboriginal/blob/master/www/README
>
> >>> I tested the c compiler and it works,
> >>
> >> Define "works". It took years for people to build linux-kernel
> >> with llvm, there was a whole PROJECT for it, which has mostly gone
> >> the way of uclinux.org (declared victory and disbanded). And I
> >> specifically mean "the kernel",
> >>
>
>
> https://www.cnx-software.com/2012/07/16/ellcc-multi-target-cross-compiler-based-on-clang-and-llvm-compiler-infrastructure/
>
> >> was about trying to get userspace to work...
> >
> > Works means it is able to generate valid elf programs and shared
> > libs that the musl's ld loader can run.
>
> I got tinycc to do that back in the day too. Building hello world and
> building a bootable system have a bit of distance between them.
>
> > I didn't test compiling the kernel with it, but now I'm curious, I'm
> > gonna use the compiled tcc to compile the rest of the system in my
> > following versions.
>
> My old fork taught tinycc basic constant propagation (which I believe
> Grischka merged into his version), but it didn't have dead code
> elimination, was missing c99 vararrays, didn't even try c11 features
> (These days toybox uses struct blah){x=y;} style complex inline
> constants and __has_include(), the latter of which is really a
> preprocessor feature not a language feature.)
>
> One thing I definitely wanted to do that I have yet to hear of tinycc
> implementing is a multiplexer so you can symlink cc/ld/as/strip/cpp to
> tinycc and it'll behave as the appropriate binary. Heck, just being able
> to use tcc's (much faster) preprocessor in distcc would be a big win,
> but alas there's a LOT of implicit architecture knowledge baked into
> that. Try running: gcc -E -dM - </dev/null
>
> I remember  trying to get just tinycc's linker to work circa
> https://landley.net/notes-2008.html#09-04-2008 but it didn't have the
> concept of --gc-sections. That day's blog entry also mentions trying to
> get it to work on an arm host but it couldn't build a libtcc.a for that
> target so I had to use libgcc...
>
> Grishka wasn't _interested_ in fixing any of these issues, because they
> didn't affect Windows.
>
> >> Don't ask me why gnu/they don't gnu/emit the gnu/failures to
> >> stderr. That would make too much sense, they need gnu/hazing
> >> rituals to keep out the unwashed masses I guess.
> >
> > And a ton of extensions to make things non compliant...
>
> So? Compliant with what, Turbo C's "near" and "far" keywords? Microsoft
> Visual C? Half the posix-2008 features like openat() started as glibc
> extensions, the C committee is just a bit slower on the uptake than
> posix. (Which is sad because there was a SIXTEEN YEAR GAP between
> posix-2008 and posix-2024, and we're arguing about "make -j" on the list
> because of COURSE they didn't standardize "nproc". Linux 2.0 added SMP
> support in 28 years ago, Intel shipped its first SMP laptop processor 18
> years ago, the first SMP smartphonephone came out 13 years ago... And
> posix came out with a uniprocessor standard earlier this year. Of course.)
>
> Intel's icc was the second compiler to build Linux in something like
> 2005, because they implemented all the gcc extensions Linux used.
> Fabrice Bellard's tccboot work also involved either implementing or
> stripping out stuff like "a ? : b" as a synonym for "a ? a : b" (which
> does not recalculate A), which I think got picked up by one of the newer
> C standards? (C11 was it? I forget, I only moved from C99 to C11


no, i just checked C23 6.5.15 in case i'd missed this (because a lot of
common extensions _are_ newly standardized in C23), but this isn't there.


because
> I wanted __has_include() and the ability to typecast up an inline array
> instance, I think there's at least one more C standard released since
> but I glance at the change list when they come out and generally go "oh
> hey, a different syntax for atomics, they're still ignoring LP64 I
> see..." and continue with what I was doing.)
>
> >> Doing toybox _and_ tcc at the same time seems a bit extreme, in
> >> general changing multiple variables at once makes experimental
> >> results WAY >>
>
> harder to parse. Hence the invention of laboratory conditions. :)
>
> >
> > nahh
>
> I got my project to work. Aboriginal Linux rebuilt itself under itself
> and built Linux From Scratch under the result. Alpine Linux built on
> that work to do a full distro.
>
> I only shut it down in 2017 because I was starting over with mkroot,
> which is A) way simpler, C) uses toybox instead of busybox and musl-libc
> instead of uClibc, D) outsources the toolchain build(s) to a separate
> script, E) isn't finished yet. :)
>
> >> You might also want to coordinate with
>  >>
>
> http://lists.landley.net/pipermail/toybox-landley.net/2024-September/030526.html
> >> (which is another reply window I have open but haven't managed to
> >> scrape up the spoons for yet).
> > Cool, thanks.
> >
> >> (I have "writing a new make" on my toybox todo list,
> >
> > That would be awesome, I also tried building bmake (BSD Make) but it
> > also needs me to run ./configure, so I ended up in the same place.
>
> https://landley.net/toybox/faq.html#hermetic
>
> https://github.com/landley/toybox/blob/master/scripts/prereq/build.sh
>
> >> but hit burnout this year. Sometime between moving from TX to MN
> >> this spring, getting flooded here on the list by a well-meaning
> >> developer who just took the fun out of everything, getting covid
> >> YET AGAIN (still sucks), having yet to find a proper coffee shop
> >> setup here in minneapolis (workspace is important), and the looming
> >> return out outright fascism, I've spent the past few months kinda
> >> spinning my wheels...)
> >
> > I am so sorry about this, hope you get back on track soon.
>
> Me too. :(
>
> >>> so it may be something related to how GNU autotools interact with
> >>> toybox or the compiler.
> >>
> >> Do you mean you built gmake with tinycc, and the rest of the $PATH
> >> being debian or similar?
> >
> > I'm trying to build make on the resulting system (toybox, mksh &
> > tcc).
>
> You've changed multiple variables at once.
>
> >>> The errors are hard to follow, but it seems to be related with
> >>> the confdefs.h and .c files, after a lot of sed and cat
> >>> commands. The idea is to bootstrap the build tools, i.e. compile
> >>> make without make or other tools that depend on make.
> >>
> >> Ok, I'll bite. How do you compile make without make? (Do they
> >> provide a shell script, like toybox's
> >> https://landley.net/toybox/faq.html#hermetic or what?)
> >
> > Fortunately, the make tarball comes with a bootstrap script that,
> > supposedly, builds make without make.
>
> Cool. Like mine, above. :)
>
> > I guess the gnu tools must start somewhere... But it runs ./configure
> > as a first step, which is where I'm stuck.
>
> Yeah, that's silly. Mine does NOT run configure, it's a packaged up
> single compiler invocation with known behavior and no dependencies
> except libc and the compiler. (The point is your compiler should know
> how to produce binaries for your system.)
>
> It wants a shell, but it's just doing simple variable assignment and
> substitution, even lash could presumably handle that.
>
> >> That "can't create temporary file" looks like the first error.
> >> Which is not a string that exists in toybox (where we'd almost
> >> certainly say "temp" to save 5 bytes :) but presumably is configure
> >> responding to a command failure? Again, check config.log.
> >
> > The contents of config.log:
> >
> > This file contains any messages produced by compilers while running
> > configure, to aid debugging if configure makes a mistake....
>  > configure:982: checking for cc
> > configure:1065: checking whether the C compiler (cc  ) works
> > configure:1081: cc -o conftest    conftest.c  1>&5 tcc: error:
> > undefined symbol 'main'
>
> That could be a tcc bug, but I dunno what was in "conftest.c". (The test
> didn't say -c to create a .o file so I assume there SHOULD be a main()...)
>
> > configure: failed program was:
> >
> > This tcc error I was able to reproduce by trying to compile an empty
> > file.
>
> Yeah but why was it empty? That compiler invocation doesn't seem like it
> expected an empty file. What generated that conftest.c?
>
> Rob
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