Hi, Aaron Isotton wrote:
As far as I can see at least for the packages using autotools this should not be too difficult; it should be enough to adapt debian/control to generate the mingw32 packages and debian/rules to pass an appropriate '--host' parameter to configure.
If the package is sufficiently cross-platform that it compiles on Windows.
Has anybody else done something like this?
There are a few packages that can build mingw32 cross-compile packages, notably wxwidgets. These are not built by default to avoid cluttering up the archive; there would need to be a framework for those packages before it could be implemented on a wider scale.
Offhand, my approach would be similar to this:1. Create registry of cross compilation architectures. These are architectures that will never become Debian architectures for obvious reasons, like not using a free kernel and/or libc. "mingw32", "darwin", "palmos", "amigaos"[1] would be prime examples. The main factor about making an architecture a cross compilation architecture is that there are stub libraries in the place of the real core libraries.
2. Create separate package repository. There is no sane reason such packages should go into the main distribution now.
3. Think of a new tag for the source control file to serve as a hint that a source package can build cross packages for at least one of the architectures under step 1. "X-Cross: mingw32" would be my suggestion here.
4. Set up autobuilders that pick those packages, invoke their binary-cross target and upload the resulting packages to the infrastructure from step 2. The binary-cross target is not supposed to create anything but the cross compilation packages.
5. Patch Debian packages, submit wishlist bugs. 6. Repeat steps 4 and 5. Simon[1] Incidentally, this is one of the things that are going to happen soonish, as the Amiga needs a new bootloader badly, and it should be possible to build that from source from within Debian.
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