path: root/INSTALL

Build Instructions
------------------

* Requirements
  ------------

  - A POSIX-compliant C development environment
  - GNU make version 3.81 or later
  - If cross-compiling: the sysdeps for your target architecture
    (see the "Cross-compilation" section below)

 This software will install on any operating system that implements
POSIX.1-2008, available at:
  http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/


* Standard usage
  --------------

  ./configure && make && sudo make install

 will work for most users.
 It will install the static libraries in /usr/lib/skalibs, the shared
libraries in /lib, and the sysdeps in /usr/lib/skalibs/sysdeps.

 You can strip the libraries of their extra symbols via "make strip"
before the "make install" phase. It will shave a few bytes off them.


* Customization
  -------------

 You can customize the installation process via flags given to configure.
 See ./configure --help for a list of all available configure options.


* Environment variables
  ---------------------

 Controlling a build process via environment variables is a big and
dangerous hammer. You should try and pass flags to configure instead;
nevertheless, the standard environment variables are recognized.

 The value of the CROSS_COMPILE environment variable will prefix the
building tools' names. The --enable-cross option is preferred, see
"Cross-compilation" below.
 
 If the CC environment variable is set, its value will override compiler
detection by configure.

 The values of CFLAGS, CPPFLAGS and LDFLAGS will be appended to flags
auto-detected by configure. To entirely override the flags set by
configure instead, use make -e.

 The Makefile supports the DESTDIR convention for staging.


* Shared libraries
  ----------------

 Software from skarnet.org is small enough that shared libraries are
generally not worth using. Static linking is simpler and incurs less
runtime overhead and less points of failure: but since skalibs only
provides libraries, both versions are built by default.
 Nevertheless, you can:
  * avoid building shared libraries: --disable-shared
  * avoid building static libraries: --disable-static

 If you are using a GNU/Linux system, be aware that the GNU libc
behaves badly with static linking and produces huge executables,
so if you plan on making static executables, you should consider
using another libc, which you also need to use when compiling
skalibs. musl is recommended: http://musl-libc.org/


* Cross-compilation
  -----------------

 skarnet.org centralizes all the difficulty of cross-compilation
in skalibs.
 The native skalibs build process runs some tests to gather "sysdeps",
i.e. system-dependent properties of the target, and stores those
into a sysdeps directory; software depending on skalibs is provided
the name of the sysdeps directory at build time, and can depend on
its contents - that's how skarnet.org packages are easily made
portable.
 However, when the host differs from the target - the cross-compilation
case - those build-time tests are invalid. So you must provide
configure with a precomputed sysdeps directory, containing valid
sysdeps values for your target.

 Use the --with-sysdeps=DIR option to specify DIR as a sysdeps
directory for your target. Also use the --enable-cross=PREFIX option
to specify a cross-compiling PREFIX for your toolchain's binaries,
or simply --enable-cross if your default toolchain is a cross-compiler.

 If you know the peculiarities of your target system, you can build
a sysdeps directory by hand. However, a much easier, and recommended,
method of obtaining sysdeps, is to natively determine them (via
./configure) in a virtual machine, for instance provided by qemu. If you
are using Linux, simple root filesystems bootable with qemu for testing
purposes are available at Aboriginal Linux: http://landley.net/aboriginal/
 Precomputed sysdeps for various targets may also be available on
skarnet.org or on third-party sites.


* The slashpackage convention
  ---------------------------

 The slashpackage convention (http://cr.yp.to/slashpackage.html)
is a package installation scheme that provides a few guarantees
over other conventions such as the FHS, for instance fixed
absolute pathnames. skarnet.org packages support it: use the
--enable-slashpackage option to configure, or
--enable-slashpackage=DIR for a prefixed DIR/package tree.
This option will activate slashpackage support during the build
and set slashpackage-compatible installation directories. If
$version is the current skalibs version number:

 --bindir will be set to /package/prog/skalibs-$version/command
 --includedir will be set to /package/prog/skalibs-$version/include
 --libdir will be set to /package/prog/skalibs-$version/library
 --dynlibdir will be set to /package/prog/skalibs-$version/library.so
 --sysdepdir will be set to /package/prog/skalibs-$version/sysdeps

 Note that --datadir will be unchanged, because the data exported
by skalibs, i.e. the leap second table, is system-wide. You should
manually specify --datadir=... if you want to deviate from the default.

 --prefix is pretty much ignored when you use --enable-slashpackage:
it will only impact --datadir. You should probably not use both
--enable-slashpackage and --prefix.

 When using slashpackage, two additional Makefile targets are
available after "make install":
 - "make -L update" changes the default version of the software to the
freshly installed one. (This is useful when you have several installed
versions of the same software, which slashpackage supports.)
 - "make -L global-links" adds links from DIR/command and DIR/library.so
to the default version of the binaries and shared libraries.
 The "-L" option to make is necessary because targets are symbolic links,
and the default make behaviour is to check the pointed file's timestamp
and not the symlink's timestamp.


* Out-of-tree builds
  ------------------

 skarnet.org packages do not support out-of-tree builds. They
are small, so it does not cost much to duplicate the entire
source tree if parallel builds are needed.