Re: dpkg-cross maintenance status

[NIIBE Yutaka <gniibe@m17n.org>]

David Schleef wrote:
 > Perhaps some day, we might have cross-compiling as part of Debian
 > policy (or at least a tag for cross-compiliability), but I
 > certainly wouldn't advocate that now, as it would cause too much
 > turmoil.

Things I've noticed:

   (1) Original software is not ready for cross compiling, hard to solve.
       Typical case is the one which builds small program at first
       and then run it to generate full-featured one.
          Perl, GNU Emacs and others.

   (2) Original software is not ready for cross compiling, easy to fix.
       Software which hard-code C compiler as "gcc" in Makefile.
       Just fix it to $(CC).

   (3) Pakcages which need --host=XXX option when invoking configure.

   (4) Packaging mistake.  Confusion of BUILD and HOST.

   (5) Package which does test on build.  We cannot test generated
       executable in case of cross compiling.

I think that for case #5, we could have some sort of guildline or
tools, separation of build and test would be good thing (in general).
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