Re: Let's remove mips, mipsel, s390, ... (Was: [Fwd: Re: GTK+2.0 2.6.2-3 and buildds running out of space])

[Peter 'p2' De Schrijver <p2@mind.be>]

> There are a few reasons why we usually avoid cross-compilers for buildd
> purposes. For one, as one cannot as easily test a cross-compiler by
> running a test suite, it may have been miscompiled -- but you wouldn't
> notice; this would result in strange, hard to debug behaviour by the
> resulting cross-compiled packages. For another, satisfying

This can be solved by using emulation tools (like qemu). Unfortunately
qemu doesn't support m68k as a target yet. It would not only help for
cross buildd's, but also allow maintainers to debug arch specific
problems in their package on their laptop :)

> build-dependencies for cross-compiling is pretty hard, as anyone using
> dpkg-cross can tell you.
> 

Yes, this is not solved yet, although emdebian and scratchbox are
making progress in this area. Someday this problem will be mastered, at
least for archs which have qemu support. The critical part is executing
target code in maintainer and build scripts. This can be done using
qemu user emulation.

Cheers,

Peter (p2).

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