Bug#766708: Processed: Re: Bug#766708: breaks multiarch cross building
On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 4:41 PM, Don Armstrong <don@debian.org> 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.
Important use case that people seem to be ignored: cross-building
source code but *not* using Debian infrastructure. This still matters
to Debian because it affects how much support both upstream and the
package maintainers can give without having access to actual hardware.
If cross-compilers are available in the exact same version (which,
depending on where the bug is found, may be in the stable release or
not), it is *much* easier for the people with more intimate knowledge
of the package to directly support it.
The code I work on isn't packaged for Debian yet, but without having
cross-compilers to play with, I will *never* be able to support
anything other than x86-*. I was using secretsauce builds for a while
on my dev machine (when I think to test them), but that's not suitable
for running my buildbot. I got excited that it was landing in time for
Jessie, but because of this maintainer turf war it looks like I'll be
another 3 years (i.e. until 'Stretch' is stable) without CI for
non-x86 arches.
I expect that my code will be ready to be packaged for Stretch, but
who is going to take responsibility for finding and fixing the non-x86
bugs, given that the gcc maintainer is going out of his way to make
things difficult?
Honestly, disabling cross-compilers sounds like saying "x86-* are the
only arches that matter" and negating the entire selling point of
multiarch. I can't seriously believe the argument against
cross-compilers is "you need to enable multiarch repos" - where else
are you going to get all your library dependencies - bring back an
entire set of ia32-libs packages, but for *every* arch?
This is ludicrous, but it sounds like what the gcc maintainer is recommending.
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