Cross-compiling LibreOffice *************************** Cross-compilation works, to various degree, to the following platforms: iOS, Android, and Raspbian. Note that this document has not been updated very often, and not everything here necessarily is true any more. General ------- In GNU Autoconf terminology, "build" is the platform on which you are running a build of some software and "host" is the platform on which the software you are building will run. Only in the specific case of building compilers and other programming tools is the term "target" used to indicate the platform for which the tools your are building will produce code. As LibreOffice is not a compiler, the "target" term should not be used in the context of cross-compilation. (For a case where all three of "build", "host" and "target" are different: consider a gcc cross-compiler running on Windows, producing code for Android, where the cross-compiler itself was built on Linux. (This is a real case.) An interesting tidbit is that such configurations are called "Canadian Cross".) Even though the LibreOffice build mechanism is highly unorthodox, the configure script takes the normal --build and --host options like any GNU Autoconf -based configure script. To cross-compile, you basically need just to specify a suitable --host option and things should work out nicely. In practice, many details need to be handled. See examples below. Note that in the case of LibreOffice, it is uncommon to run the configure script directly. Normally one uses the autogen.sh script. The autogen.sh script reads command-line options from file called autogen.input if it exists. The typical way of working is to keep the configure parameters in that file and edit it as needed. What is so hard, then? ---------------------- Despite the fact that the configure script takes normal --build and --host options, that is just the beginning. It was necessary to separate tests for "host" and "build" platforms in the configure script. See the git log for details. And the reasonably "standard" configure.in is just the top level; when we get down to the actual makefilery used to build the bits of LibreOffice, it gets much worse. iOS *** iOS is the operating system on Apple's mobile devices. Clearly for a device like the iPad it would not be acceptable to run a normal LibreOffice application with overlapping windows and mouse-oriented GUI widgets. It makes sense to use only a part of LibreOffice's code for iOS. Lots of the GUI-oriented code should be left out. iOS apps that want to use the applicable LibreOffice code will handle all their GUI in a platform-dependent manner. How well it will be possible to do such a split remains to be seen. Obviously we want it to be possible to eventually distribute apps using LibreOffice code through the App Store. Technically, one important special aspect of iOS is that apps in the App Store are not allowed to load own dynamic libraries. (System libraries are used in the form of dynamic libraries, just like on macOS, of which iOS is a variant.) Thus all the libraries in LibreOffice that normally are shared libraries (DLLs on Windows, shared objects (.so) on Linux, dynamic libraries on macOS (.dylib)) must be built as static archives instead. This has some interesting consequences for how UNO is implemented and used. An iOS app is a "bundle" that contains a single executable. In an app using LibreOffice code, that executable then contains the necessary LibreOffice libraries and UNO components statically linked. The Apple tool-chain for iOS cross-building is available only for OS X. In order to be able to run and debug an app on an actual device (and not just the iOS Simulator) you need to be registered in the iOS Developer Program. Here is an autogen.input for iOS (device) using Xcode 4.6, on macOS 10.8: --build=i386-apple-darwin10.7.0 --host=arm-apple-darwin10 --enable-dbgutil --enable-debug --enable-werror For the iOS Simulator, but note that building for the simulator is broken at the moment (July 2014): --build=i386-apple-darwin10.7.0 --host=arm-apple-darwin10 --enable-ios-simulator --enable-dbgutil --enable-debug --enable-werror You will have to install autoconf and automake yourself before running autogen.sh. They are no longer included in Xcode 4.3 and later (not even in the add-on "command line tools"). The -mmacosx-version-min=10.7 is necessary when building for the iOS simulator to avoid clang replacing simple calls to fprintf with calls to fwrite$UNIX2003 which Xcode then warns that doesn't exist on iOS. Android ******* From a technical point of view the core Android OS (the kernel) is Linux, but everything else is different. Unlike iOS, an Android app can use shared objects just fine, so that aspect of UNO doesn't need special handling. Except that there is a silly low limit in the Android dynamic linker on the number of libraries you can dlopen. This is a limitation in user-level (but system-provided and not really replaceable) code, not the kernel. Thus, just like for iOS, also for Android the LibreOffice libraries and UNO components are built as static archives. For Android, those static archives, and any app-specific native code, are linked into one single app-specific shared library, called liblo-native-code.so. For the GUI, the same holds as said above for iOS. The GUI layer needs to be platform-specific, written in Java. Android cross-compilation work has been done mainly on Linux (openSUSE in particular). Earlier also cross-compiling from macOS was tried. The Android cross-compilation tool-chain (the "Native Development Kit", or NDK) is available for Linux, macOS and Windows, but trying to cross-compile LibreOffice from Windows will probably drive you insane. You will also need the Android SDK as full "make" also builds a couple of Android apps where the upper layer is written in Java. Use the "android" tool from the SDK to install the SDK Tools, SDK Platform Tools, the API 15 SDK Platform and the Android Support Library. If you want to run the Android apps in the emulator, you of course need an appropriate system image for that. Here is an autogen.input for Android on ARM when cross-compiling from Linux: --enable-dbgutil --enable-werror --with-distro=LibreOfficeAndroid And here is an (quite old) autogen.input for Android on X86: --with-android-ndk=/opt/libreoffice/android-ndk-r8b --with-android-ndk-toolchain-version=4.6 --with-android-sdk=/opt/libreoffice/android-sdk-linux --build=i586-suse-linux --enable-ccache --with-distro=LibreOfficeAndroidX86 A LibreOffice app for Android is being developed progress in the android/source directory. To run the app, do "make install" followed by either "make run" or starting it from Android itself. You most likely want to have an "adb logcat" running in another window. To debug, run "make debugrun". NB: If you happen to upgrade to Android SDK Tools 23, and the build (using 'make verbose=t android') fails for you with: [dx] UNEXPECTED TOP-LEVEL EXCEPTION: [dx] java.io.FileNotFoundException: /local/libreoffice/android-sdk-linux/tools/support/annotations.jar (no such file or directory) you need to copy the annotations.jar from an older sdk; like wget 'http://dl-ssl.google.com/android/repository/tools_r22.6.2-linux.zip' unzip tools_r22.6.2-linux.zip cp tools/support/annotations.jar /tools/support/ Raspbian ******** In theory, this should work also for another Linux, it does not need to be Raspbian. But this cross-compilation work is tested from Debian and openSUSE to Raspbian. You will need headers, pkg-config files and libraries from a Raspbian system to build against. Available at https://dev-www.libreoffice.org/extern/ . Look for the latest raspbian-root-*.tar.gz . For instance: $ wget https://dev-www.libreoffice.org/extern/raspbian-root-20140120.tar.gz $ mkdir raspbian-root $ cd raspbian-root $ tar -xf raspbian-root-20140120.tar.gz You can build cross-compiler yourself or get the executables here: $ git clone git://github.com/raspberrypi/tools tools/arm-bcm2708/gcc-linaro-arm-linux-gnueabihf-raspbian is known to work. Then create pkg-config wrapper, something like: $ cat > pkg-config-wrapper-host << _EOF #!/bin/sh if [ "$CROSS_COMPILING" = TRUE ]; then SYSROOT=$HOME/lo/raspbian-root export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=${SYSROOT}/usr/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/pkgconfig:${SYSROOT}/usr/share/pkgconfig export PKG_CONFIG_LIBDIR=${SYSROOT}/usr/lib/pkgconfig export PKG_CONFIG_SYSROOT_DIR=${SYSROOT} fi exec pkg-config "\$@" _EOF $ chmod +x pkg-config-wrapper-host This does not work with pkg-config 0.23. 0.26 is known to work. And you are ready to build with autogen.input similar to: PKG_CONFIG= CC= --sysroot= CXX= --sysroot= --build=x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu --host=arm-unknown-linux-gnueabihf --disable-sdk --enable-python=system PYTHON_CFLAGS=-I/usr/include/python2.7 PYTHON_LIBS=-lpython2.7 --with-java JAVAINC=-I/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk-armhf/include --with-system-cairo --with-system-cppunit --with-system-icu --with-system-neon --with-system-nss --with-system-openldap --with-system-openssl --with-system-redland Finally, when you are ready to run the binaries in Raspbian, you may need to get more system libraries, who knows. $ sudo apt-get install libreoffice # or similar That installs libreoffice too, which you don't need because you have just built one, but I don't know how to avoid it easily.