Problems with cross compiling

Sqlite3 is a well-behaved package and cross compiles nicely but not all packages are so tame. Typical pain points include:

• Home-grown build systems, zlib, for example, has a configure script but it does not behave like the Autotools configure described in the previous section
• Configure scripts that read pkg-config information, headers, and other files from the host, disregarding the --host override
• Scripts that insist on trying to run cross compiled code

Each case requires careful analysis of the error and additional parameters to the configure script to provide the correct information or patches to the code to avoid the problem altogether. Bear in mind that one package may have many dependencies, especially with programs that have a graphical interface using GTK or QT or handle multimedia content. As an example, mplayer, which is a popular tool for playing multimedia content, has dependencies on over 100 libraries. It would take weeks of effort to build them all.

Therefore, I would not recommend manually cross compiling components for the target in this way except when there is no alternative, or the number of packages to build is small. A much better approach is to use a build tool such as Buildroot or the Yocto Project, or, avoid the problem altogether by setting up a native build environment for your target architecture. Now you can see why distributions like Debian are always compiled natively.