Bug#766708: Processed: Re: Bug#766708: breaks multiarch cross building

[Helmut Grohne <helmut@subdivi.de>]

Hi Don,

On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 04:41:49PM -0800, Don Armstrong wrote:
> Are people who are doing cross-building like this actually using the
> code which will be in jessie? I (perhaps naïvely) would expect them to
> be primarily using the code in unstable, and maybe at a late stage of
> bring-up rebuilding all of stable.

Thanks for asking this. Let me give two answers to this question:

1) No. The continuous integration happened in sid and people
   bootstrapping new architectures tend to use sid plus patches. However
   the method of bootstrapping that was known working two weeks before
   the freeze no longer works. Whatever method is going to be used now,
   it requires changing packages. Since these changes tend to not fall
   under the freeze policy, they are practically not mergeable. So in
   this answer, jessie is to be understood as a time frame: Keep things
   working that worked before until we are allowed to fix things.

2) Yes. People repeatedly ask for cross toolchains on stable systems.
   This is the very reason why Wookey tried to package them for jessie.
   Ultimately, they ended being late, so people will try to build them
   on their own and for the popular targets (mostly armhf, armel) this
   actually worked.

Helmut