Cross Compiling ghostscript for android, what host should I use?

Question

Hi Guys I am using this tutorial to build ghostscript-9.19 to be able to use in my android application to convert eps document to pdf. It fails while configure. Here are the logs

checking whether to enable maintainer-specific portions of Makefiles...
no
checking for gcc... arm-linux-androideabi-gcc -- 
sysroot=/<path>/android-ndk-   
r11c/platforms/android-17/arch-arm/
checking whether the C compiler works... yes
checking for C compiler default output file name... a.out
checking for suffix of executables... 
checking whether we are cross compiling... configure: error: in    
`/<path>/ghostscript-9.19/tiff-config':
configure: error: cannot run C compiled programs.
If you meant to cross compile, use `--host'.
See `config.log' for more details
configure: error: libtiff configure script failed

This is the build file I am running

#!/bin/sh
# Compiles ghostscript for Android
# Make sure you have NDK_ROOT defined in .bashrc or .bash_profile

INSTALL_DIR="`pwd`/app/jni/gs"
SRC_DIR="`pwd`/../ghostscript-9.19"

cd $SRC_DIR

export
PATH="/<path>/android-ndk-r11c/toolchains/arm-        
linux-androideabi-4.9/prebuilt/darwin-x86_64/bin:$PATH"
export SYS_ROOT="/<path>/Android/android-ndk-
r11c/platforms/android-17/arch-arm/"
export CC="arm-linux-androideabi-gcc --sysroot=$SYS_ROOT"
export LD="arm-linux-androideabi-ld"
export AR="arm-linux-androideabi-ar"
export RANLIB="arm-linux-androideabi-ranlib"
export STRIP="arm-linux-androideabi-strip"

mkdir -p $INSTALL_DIR
./configure --host=arm-linux-androideabi --build=x86_64-apple-darwin
--prefix=$INSTALL_DIR LIBS="-lc -lgcc"

make PREFIX=$INSTALL_DIR
make install DESTDIR=$INSTALL_DIR

exit 0

I am using --host=arm-linux-androideabi. What host should i use? What do I need to change in ghostScript project to make compile in successfully? Any help is highly appreciated.

Answer 1

Cross compiling Ghostscript is pretty involved, partly because the Ghostscript build relies on building and running interim tools (genarch, genconf, mkromfs and echogs) which, obviously, must be built with the native compiler, rather than the cross compiler.

I think the problem you are seeing is because the call to the libtiff configure doesn't pass on the required options.

You may be better served grabbing, and tweaking the two files (a makefile and a header) from this commit: Makefile for Android MuPDF libgs.so

and tweaking it to match your requirements.

There is a basic guide of what to do for cross compiling at the bottom of this page: Ghostscript FAQ

I have a "project" to improve support for cross compiling, but it is slow going at the moment.