Re: Suggestions for how ARM Ltd could help Debian?
In message <[🔎] 3FE18CE8.4090604@nokia.com>
Lauri Leukkunen <lauri.leukkunen@nokia.com> wrote:
> ext Peter Naulls wrote:
> > I'm a bit concerned by the impression given by the whole scratchbox
> > idea, especially its rationale for existing. I'm not saying it doesn't
> > have its place, but, as many people will atest to, the majority of
> > basic unix utilities can and do cross compile, using well defined (is
> > most cases, anyway) mechanisms provided by configure.
>
> I wonder what you include in your "basic unix utilities", if you are
> mostly talking about non-GUI components then yes, I do agree with you
> that they can be cross-compiled in the normal way (we've done it), but
> as you move higher up in the software stack, things get ugly.
Do they? :-)
All these I have cross compiled without incident (and many more):
XFree86, The GIMP, Dillo, knews, freeciv, and of course all the related
libraries that these imply, including GTK et al.
> Scratchbox aims at providing an environment where we can cross-compile a
> substantial subset of desktop applications for ARM with as few
> modifications as possible. This is needed to facilitate easy upgrade of
> the components, we don't want to get stuck with our hacked-up version of
> gtk. The effort to tweak an individual component may seem small, but
> this tweaking needs to be done over and over again as new versions come out.
I don't doubt that your requirements may justify the project, but I do
object to the implications made by this project to someone who might be
relatively ignorant on the subject.
> Eventually we'd like to be able to cross-compile the "interesting" parts
> of Debian from scratch. There are other issues that would need to be
> solved first however. First of all Debian would need to be buildable
> from scratch natively before starting to think about doing the same by
> cross-compiling.
I'm sure that would be a useful project, but given the availbilty of
StrongARM/XScale machines, it's almost certainly something I would
personally do on a native ARM platform.
--
Peter Naulls - peter@chocky.org | http://www.chocky.org/
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