Re: Packaging a library that requires cross-compiled code

["Ondrej Certik" <ondrej@certik.cz>]

> This is exactly the point I've been trying to make for a long time,
> about things like autoconf and automake1.x, and why you should
> build-depend on them and run them every time.  Because it proves that
> we are fully self-hosting, and the main reason _not_ to do it is the
> fear that we might _not_ actually be self-hosting.  Which is something
> I believe we've promised our users, implicitly if not explicitly.
>
> Clearly, many people in Debian disagree that being self-hosting is
> sufficiently worthwhile, but would rather work around hypothetical
> autotools incompatibilities by, essentially, running them as
> infrequently as they can get away with, and hoping they catch whatever
> problems show up, before uploading.  (And with a tool like autoconf,
> whose very _essence_ requires that it behave differently on different
> systems, this seems unlikely.)
>
> Until Debian as a whole can agree that it is important to be
> self-hosting, and to be confident enough in our autotools maintainers
> to trust their packages for automated builds, I don't think you should
> ask David to build a whole cross compiler.  After all, that's not only
> a _lot_ more complex to maintain, but more build-resources-expensive.

+1

Ondrej