wanting to verify that a toolchain should be entirely self-contained

["Robert P. J. Day" <rpjday at crashcourse dot ca>]

  here's a question for which i'm pretty sure i know the answer, but i
need to be absolutely sure.

  i'm trying to cross-compile a downloaded tarball (the toolchain was
downloaded from a vendor), and the instructions for cross-compiling
were simply to

  $ make CC=arm-...-gcc LD=arm-...-ld

which is pretty standard.  but the cross compile failed almost
immediately, complaining about a missing "curses.h" file.

  the software compiles fine natively on my ubuntu 10.04 system,
because i have all the curses-related packages installed.  but if i'm
trying to cross-compile, is it not the responsibility of the
*toolchain* to supply all necessary standard header files?

  as soon as i got that error, i checked where i installed the
toolchain and noticed immediately that there was no curses.h file, and
mentioned that.

  someone else claimed that what i really needed to do was install the
toolchain at /opt rather than elsewhere because the README claimed
that the toolchain wasn't relocatable.  but i can't see how that's
relevant.

  if i'm trying to cross-compile, and a C file includes a header file,
and the toolchain doesn't supply that header file, shouldn't i expect
the build to fail?  i certainly don't expect the cross compiler to
wander off, looking for header files elsewhere so my position is that
that toolchain simply isn't capable of compiling anything that
requires curses capability because it doesn't provide a curses.h file.

  am i misunderstanding anything here?

rday

-- 

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Robert P. J. Day                               Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

        Top-notch, inexpensive online Linux/OSS/kernel courses
                        http://crashcourse.ca

Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
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