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

[Sam Hartman <hartmans@debian.org>]

>>>>> "Ron" == Ron  <ron@debian.org> writes:


    Ron> I'd be kind of sad if that stopped being possible again for the
    Ron> final released version of Jessie, and we had to skip yet
    Ron> another release before being able to do this on Debian again.
    Ron> It may not be the best and final answer, but it has some
    Ron> advantages over the proposed alternative, like being able to
    Ron> work with existing m-a packages without needing to rebuild
    Ron> custom versions of everything, and actually working on Debian
    Ron> today.

I personally think that this use case--building on non-native hardware
not for bootstrap but for things where that really just is the wrong
answer is an important use case for our toolchains.
I'm not saying it is an important use case for the debian archive.
However for debian developers using debian and for our downstreams, this
seems like it can be very valuable.

In particular, I want to take the Debian archive or one of our
downstreams, build a cross tool chain, and build additional packages
against that archive that would work with the packages in that archive.
As an example, I'd like to build some of the prerelease moonshot
packages (http://www.project-moonshot.org/) for some arm boards and I
don't want to build on those boards.
I want the resulting packages to be usable by anyone without needing to
install some magic cross toolchain libraries.

I don't care which mechanism ]is used to produce this.
I understand how to doo this with the method being removed in Jessie.
I can't even understand if this is possible with the default method.