Re: [PATCH] binutils: enable s390x/ppc64el on arm64 hosts

[Alex Bennée <alex.bennee@linaro.org>]

Helmut Grohne <helmut@subdivi.de> writes:

> Hi Alex,
>
> On Tue, Feb 12, 2019 at 09:05:33PM +0000, Alex Bennée wrote:
>> Currently:
>>
>>   apt-get build-dep qemu
>>
>> Is broken on arm64,
>
> Actually, that's fairly normal. You'll find that quite a number of
> packages fail to satisfy their Build-Depends something other than amd64.
> That's due to the fact that Debian currently builds all
> architecture-independent packages on amd64 only (unless maintainers do
> binary uploads, which is kinda discouraged for non-NEW).

Is this the plan going forward? It does seem to tie the building of
these packages forever to amd64 which I grant given the current market
share will likely be the case for some time.

> As such, it certainly is not a serious failure. The build daemons
> separate architecture-dependent packages from architecture-independent
> ones. If you "apt-get build-dep --arch-only qemu" on arm64 and that
> fails, then yes that could be serious.

That worked thanks.

> For more background on this matter, I recommend the rather longer thread
> on the open policy bug about adding Build-Indep-Architecture (#846970).
> That field is supposed to document which architecture you can build
> architecture-independent packages on. This may sound backwards
> initially, but you'll encounter a number of affected packages and the
> field is supposed to at least document the status quo.
>
> Please stop it and close #921458.

I've mentioned the reference to #846970 in replying to the #921458. I
take it there is no way of adding an explicit link between the bugs?

I'll close the bug presently.

Would it be worth opening a wishlist bug for better cross compiler
coverage on non-x86 architectures?

The QEMU project makes quite heavy use of the excellent multiarch cross
compilers that Debian provides but currently all the tooling for that
falls flat on it's face the moment you run it on a non-x86 machine. We
can work around it of course with linux-user powered images but it's
certainly sub-optimal.

--
Alex Bennée