Lighttpd

I guess there was a reason why this was disabled

Yes, that is plausible! ;-)

did you test cross-compiling for pcre works at least for you?

Yes, first I have built a rootfs with gentoos crossdev tools. After I have created the patch and applied it, lighttpd works with pcre.
Now I prepared ptxdist and also here the patch is working.

I found a comment in ptxdist patchset (they have a patch for 1.4.20):
"lighttpd thinks that pcre-config cannot be used when cross-compiling,
but lfu fixed pcre-config up, so that we can use it."

I'm not sure that this fix is fixing all cases. I have crosstools-ng toolchain and configure is incapable of finding the correct pcre-config or libpcre.

tested with pcre 7.9 and 8.0.2 , same result.

configure thinks it's found it but always takes the build systems pcre not the target one. I removed the build pcre-config to catch the error earlier. If not make then fails with incompatible files having gone to the wrong place.

... skipping incompatible /lib/libpcre.so.0 when searching for /lib/libpcre.so.0

CFLAGS="$CFLAGS -I$NFSROOT/usr/include " ./configure --prefix=/usr --host=arm-maverick-linux-gnueabi  LDFLAGS="-L$NFSROOT/usr/lib -L$NFSROOT/lib"   --disable-lfs   --with-gnu-ld --disable-ipv6 --without-bzip2

neither does PCRECONFIG=$NFSROOT/usr/lib or PCRECONFIG=$NFSROOT/usr/bin fix it.

Since this issue is supposed to be fixed, maybe I've just wasted two days searching and not managed to find the right incantation.

If that is the case please make it available somewhere since standard use of configure simply isnot enought.

Thanks.

I should add that PCRECONFIG=$NFSROOT/usr/bin does allow it to find pcre-config but it then set PCRELIB='' and disables the feature.