Re: Creating a hardfloat package
On 14 April 2011 01:39, Jeremiah C. Foster <jeremiah@jeremiahfoster.com> wrote:
> Hello!
Hi,
> The subject says it all. I'm looking to create a package or two and
> I'd like to use the fancy hardfloat toolchain thingy to make my
> packages all shiny. I've been reading
> http://wiki.debian.org/ArmHardFloatPort with rapt attentiond and note
> that porting of packages is in progress, I thought I might even be
> able to help out there.
We'd greatly appreciate all the help!
>
> Can someone point me to a source of documentation to describe any
> required actions on the packagers part to enable hardfloat?
Well, there is no documentation, but here are a few pointers:
1. Is armel included in the Architecture field in control? If so, it's
*very* likely
that the package will just build with armhf added there.
2. If no armel/armhf is included in there, it's possible that the
package will still
build with some fixes. For that reason, I usually check the corresponding
package on Launchpad (for Ubuntu), as they have already done some good
porting work for their armel port.
3. For packages that fail on armhf but succeed on armel, it's highly likely that
this is due to some thumb2 bug. Ubuntu is great help there, many packages
have already been fixed on ubuntu-armel for thumb2 problems and most of
the time it's just a case of backporting the thumb2 patches (as was the case
with libmad and others), and now I'm working on backporting fixes for
coq, blcr, openmsx. Dave Martin from ARM has done a great job in finding and
fixing those.
4. There are some minor compiler problems right now -due to a triplet change-
but there are working versions of 4.4,4.5,4.6 and recent binutils already. glibc
has a problem building however (on many arches iirc) and I haven't tried the
experimental version yet. Most packages should be fine.
5. Forget any java package right now, gcj is broken for armhf, we're waiting for
a fixed libffi in order to rebuild gcj with it -and hope that it
works. Unfortunately,
java is a build-dep for many packages, incl subversion, db4.x, db5.x, so if
your package needs a recent version of those, you'll just have to wait.
6. there are some fixes pending with some important packages, namely openmpi
should be fixed for both armel/armhf (again the fixes backported from Ubuntu),
which means that openmpi build-dep should be enabled for some other
packages too (in particular I'm waiting for hdf5, which just got fixed
for armhf).
7. Finally, there are some really tricky packages like compilers (fpc,
ghc, clisp,
plt-scheme, gnat, sbcl, and llvm-related packages) which would love some
attention :)
In short, check
http://buildd.debian-ports.org/status/architecture.php?a=armhf&suite=unstable
and
http://wiki.debian.org/ArmHardFloatTodo
and see what fails, if there is an existing bug report ( if not, help
us file them :).
For now, ignore the java packages, they all fail. If you're feeling
lucky, try one
of the compiler things (ghc6 should be fun to port, already tried but
got segfaults
on the cross building system :)
Anyway, thanks for the interest and of course help is welcome on all of those!
Regards
Konstantinos
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