[Soc-coordination] Status Report of Improve Debian Port on Mipsel, Week8

[Xilin Sun]

Hi,

In the past week I focused working on one package: fpc. As a large
number of packages are currently uninstallable due to lack of fpc
package in Debian port on MIPSEL, sucess in building fpc will be huge
improvement.

Some older version of fpc for mips is available at sourceforge[1],
written by David Zhang. The sources are basically a complete
reimplementation of fpcsrc/compiler/mips based on FPC 2.0.0, the
compiler targets mipsel and is described as being operational on Qemu
but not yet supporting shared libraries[2].

This is also a mainline fpc port on mips, which currently has to be
built from a non-mips host. There are instructions on the lazarus wiki
about cross-compiling with non-mips host and mipsel target. In the
last two weeks I have been trying to build fpc for mipsel on an amd64
host. I also referred to the instruction on cross-compiling for arm on
x86 host[3]. The procedure is described below.

Install cross-binutils. "binutils-mipsel-linux-gnu" 2.20.1 is
available from the emdebian source, which is same in version with the
one described in lazarus wiki, so I can install through apt-get.

Install fpc for the host arch, which is amd64 in my case.

Build a compiler which runs on the host but targets mipsel.

Then, using the new generated ppcmipsel as PP, build fpc for the
mipsel host.  At this step, I am stuck with "Syntax error: "("
unexpected" errors. The reason for such errors is unknown yet.

I will continue working on fpc in the coming week.


1. http://sourceforge.net/projects/fpc-mips/files/fpc-mips/0.90/
2. http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Native_MIPS_Systems#FPC_Implementations_for_MIPS
3. http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Setup_Cross_Compile_For_ARM

Regards,
Xilin