Hi, built a native compiler on my ARM device, it runs on the device, I tested it with a few simple c files, they compile and run correctly.
But when I try to build a larger application (anything with configure/make) it will fail. ./configure runs great, creates makefiles, however, make craps out with the message: "Makefile.10: missing separator"
I checked out the makefile, and it looks terrible. like configure forgot to add some characters to the file (almost all tabs are missing, etc...). I cant figure the problem out, there is absolutely no info about it on google, there are similar problems, but those are all caused by typos in custom makefiles, this is a makefile created by configure.
Shell is sh/ash (busybox)
make version 3.81
gcc 4.3.5
system was built with buildroot

Anybody have any ideas?
Thank you

May be the "ash" shell isn't good friends with the components in autotools,
that generate the Makefile(s) ? ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almquist_shell
QUOTE :
Note that under Linux, most scripts seem to use at least some bash-specific syntax.

This is what I suspected... That is unfortunate for me.
That URL is interesting though, I thought ash was just busybox's lightweight bash clone.
I got tcsh to compile, its configure script worked fine, bash and wget both generate crap makefiles though. tcsh doesn't work for configure, they just arent designed for that. I'll try to build dash and see how that goes, looks like that is an ash shell, but since ubuntu uses it by default for /bin/sh, it could solve this issue (its also lightweight, so maybe it will configure with busybox ash)

also, I am sure that I am not the only guy using busybox, I think its pretty popular, right? How come nobody else has seen this (e.g. on other architectures)?

Well, I don't think that busybox was ever meant to be used for software development.

It's more like a micro rescue system. Or for embedded systems, runtime only.

ok, well yeah, you are right. Busybox is indeed meant for embedded systems, but that isn't going to stop me.
busybox is still supposed to have a fully compliant sh portion, if these scripts start off with #!/bin/sh, then they should work.

If I could get bash to build, then I would switch to bash if that solved the problem.


The great Buildroot always uses busybox, correct? yet it provides an option for a native compiler, correct? so I shouldn't be the only guy with a native compiler along side busybox.


Also, I tried the exact same thing on my x86_64 machine running busybox and it configured perfectly and compiled fine. I configured, built, and installed wget from source (which is the first application that exhibited this strange ./configure behavior). So what is different between my arm system and my x86_64 system? I built these 2 machines to parallel each other, the software on them should be identical besides being run on different architectures