While working on debian one thing I have not managed to find is documentation on what packages can and can't assume about the build environment. Does such documentation exist and if not should it be created. Some specific cases i'm wondering about: I just discovered that on my beagleboard XM (under armhf sid) nacl (which previously build on a debian experimental armhf buildd but not a debian unstable armhf buildd) will build if /sys is mounted but will not build if it is not mounted. Can packages assume that /sys will be mounted in the build environment or not?I consider /sys almost as essential as /proc. However I wonder what a build process would need it for.
I will hijack this thread a bit and I know there is another one running on the subject, but assumption like this makes it impossible to cross compile most packages.
I'm currently trying to compile armhf package for the rasberry pi on a amd64 machine and naively though it would be easy to do with multiarch. I screwed my machines(replaced the dynamic linkers, ftp and other tools by arm binaries although I followed the scarce available documentation).
Natively compiling package as big as XBMC on the PI is a nightmare and current tools fails really short because you: 1) need a root filesystem for the machines. You can use debootstrap but will need many additionnal packages that are yet not build, 2) cannot install produced .deb in the root filesystem exept by running them on qemu which is..
Any hint?