distcc for windows (suggestion)

[Gherald2]

Because Gentoo is (pretty much) the most compiler-intensive environment this side of the galaxy, I think it would be cool if someone were to develop a binary distribution of distcc and the cygwin API.... for cross compiling Gentoo stuff on Windows.

I know this would be cool for me right now because at home I have two Gentoo boxes, along with three Windows ones. And at work there are about 30 Windows boxes I could make use of after hours.

Hmm, aparently forum users can't start a poll. Well just post here if you would like to see this happen. Maybe we can get an experienced developer interested in the project. If not, well, I will try and put something together myself... but its gonna quite awhile for a n00b like me to figure it all out, which is why I think a prebuilt distcc and cygwin combination might be useful to others.

[BradB]

Boot the boxes into knoppix or the gentoo liveCD if it includes distcc.
Brad
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[Gherald2]

Thanks for the suggestion, it is indeed one possible solution. However, I would like to have distcc running in the background on the windows boxen so that I can compile on-demand when the rest of my family isn't busy fragging each other. Having to boot to another OS is not as convenient.

[PowerFactor]

It's not super hard to compile it all yourself. I just did it and I'm working on writing up a howto but I'm not home right now and after tonight will be without a computer till the middle of next week. Hopefully I can get it posted shortly after that. I would post my binaries to d/l but with glibc and all it's 49MB. I don't have that kind of web space anywhere and I don't fee confident enough to set up a publicly available web server on my box right now. Just keep track of where you install everything then you can tar it up and put it on multiple windows boxes without needing to compile it all on each one.

These two links are pretty good but I did run ito a couple issues.
cygwin-to-linux-cross-howto
http://cvs.gentoo.org/~aiken/cygwin-cross/

I followed aiken's mostly. I had to use binutils 2.13.1, later versions wouldn't compile. Be sure to get your kernel headers as mentioned in the first link, aiken negleted to mention that. Use the regular gcc source, the cygwin gcc source didn't want to compile for me. You may get an error about __mempcpy during your gcc compile. Search google for it, there is a workaround out there. Basicaly you have to go in and make a #ifdef statement always false in the file that failed to compile. Also there is a note at the end of khan's howto about making gcc not add the exe extension to compiled executables. I don't think you need to do that for distcc to work properly but I did it anyway. I used distcc-2.5 and it compiled without a hitch. Hope this helps for now.

[joshdr77]

this is an awesome idea....keep my poseted for ne developments..

[Gherald2]

Excellent, and thanks for the links! I would pobably be able to figure it out with that info.

Yet I still think a binary distribution would be cool... for convenience sake, as I am sure there are plenty of people out there like me who would have no other use for a cygwin installation, and are too lazy (or clueless) to figure out how to build their own cross compiler.

My work email can handle a 50mb attachment, and I have a place I could host it as of right now. The problem is, I am not sure how much longer I will have that host availeable.... it will probably only last a few months.

So if you can package your binaries well and write a proper guide to using them, I am sure you could find someone willing to host it. Either gentoo.org or sourceforge would probably be willing. This has the potential to help a lot of people IMHO.

[joshdr77]

if someone has a win32 binary can they plz msg me, coz i would really love it?

[yaubi]

I don't think a win32 binary of distcc will be a good idea. 'caus, if I understand how distcc works, it is simply a network-frontend to gcc. So it needs gcc to do his job. To get gcc running on a windows workstation, you have to install cygwin on it. So, when you already have cygwin installed on a computer, why do you want a win32 binary for distcc ? it's probably simplier to get distcc running through cygwin.
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[Gherald2]

The idea is to combine distcc and cygwin and gcc and whatever else is necessary into a simple package (perhaps just a .zip file?) than can be installed and used without any hassle.

If PowerFactor doesn't get back to me I will try and cobble this together myself.

[joshdr77]

sounds good

[bonsaikitten]

Gentoo on Cygwin is work in progress.
Check www.toso-digitals.de/gentoo/index.html for progress update.
As soon as we get the base system stable distcc et al will follow (this also accelerates testing and development, so it's in the best interest of the developers )

Cross-compiling between Linux and Windows is not recommended at the moment, sometimes it works, but I have also seen it crash and burn. Maybe a Knoppix/ GentooLive CD would be easier?

[Veto]

Is anyone currently working on a distcc/gcc-3.2.2/bin-utils tool chain .tar.gz or .zip file for cygwin for distribution? I've seen talk that a couple of people were working on it and wanted to check the status of this. If so, I'd like to lend a hand and if not I'm thinking about playing with it myself.

[bonsaikitten]

I'd be interested in any progress you make. Having distcc + ccache on Cygwin would be very useful.

[Veto]

I agree, however, if I build it..it's probably not going to be pretty....I just want something that works. I'm thinking of a /usr/local/cross subtree that I can tar.gz up and copy between cygwin distributions. My goal would be a minimal cygwin install + .tar.gz and a couple of edits to make the Win box a distcc host.

[lisa]

From the distcc mail list:

[bmph8ter]

I created a vmware virtual host on a windows machine and did a minimal Debian install on it and used that. I'm sure that RedHat, Suse, et al would also work if you can install distcc on them.
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[lisa]

[superjaded]

Hmm.. is that site experiencing the Gentoo Forums effect?
I'm getting just above 1K/s.

[theJPster]

I've just been trying to build binutils on a WinXP box on Cygwin over TightVNC. It's a bit sluggish because it's only a Dual Celeron 433 (and TightVNC server for Windows stinks). Bah, the make just failed with weird error about a missing argv.o.

I'm getting 17KB/sec on that rar. Will post back with results... hopefully better ones than than manual method. All that configure --blah stuff makes you really appreciate portage!

Edit: Is it me or is http://www.gentoo.org/~aiken not working?
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[Veto]

Thanks a lot Lisa! I grabbed the .rar file and got it installed and built distcc. I'm going to have to do some digging to figure out how to get distcc hooked up to the /usr/local/cross-linux/bin/i386....gcc.exe environment though.

[PowerFactor]

Well, for what it's worth I finally got the howto posted.
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=66930

Veto: Just put the bin dirs from your cross-tools environment at the beginning of your PATH ahead of everything else.

[Veto]

That's excellent PowerFactor. I got it running but I'm going to use your HOWTO since the download .rar file is a 3.3 compiler and I'm running the base Gentoo 3.2. I don't like the idea of running mixed compilers when I'm building kernels and the like

[Veto]

I've created a cross-linux-3.2.2.tar.bz2 file that uses the Gentoo stable build tools (binutils-2.13.90 & gcc-3.2.2). The one that Lisa posted was of a gcc-3.3 and was built i386-linux whereas I built i686-pc-linux (not sure if that matters). My package comes in around ~28MB so if someone would like to host it or get a copy, let me know.

The only thing missing from the .bz2 is distcc which I'm thinking about adding.

[DC_505]

[syadnom]

i think a more usefull alternative would be to get openmosix on windows via cgwin.