+++ Wookey [2013-05-07 22:31 +0100]:
[right. 3rd attempt at getting this email to make sense. reposting the
whole thing this time, hopefully with no remaining howlers]
+++ Stephen Kitt [2013-05-07 14:38 +0200]:
> Hi Wookey,
>
> On Tue, 7 May 2013 03:04:50 +0100, Wookey <wookey@wookware.org> wrote:
> > (just a decision to leave arch-independent headers in /usr/include and
> > move arch-dependent headers to /usr/include/triplet).
>
> Doesn't this limit us to cross-compiling only across Debian architectures? If
> we go for a full /usr/include/triplet split (in the same way as for
> libraries)
Libraries are always different for different architectures. Only a
fairly small subset of headers is, so you could say we are doing
exactly the same thing for both libaries and headers:
arch-indep stuff goes in /usr/{lib,include}
arch-dependent stuff goes in /usr/{lib,include}/triplet
But your point is taken. This is worthy of discussion to check we
have at least vague consensus
The tradeoff is:
1) (Move _all_ headers to /usr/include/triplet)
* Much duplication of installed headers
* Only one system include dir, which fits current build-system
expectations
2) (Move only arch-dependent headers to /usr/include/triplet)
* No duplication of headers
* Two system include dirs, which may confuse/break some builds
* Relatively little change from status quo
In both cases things which manage to explictly look only in '/usr/include'
may fail to build, (certainly in case 1, possibly in case 2). I have
no idea how much of a problem this would be in practice.
'2)', above, has been reasonably well tested in Ubuntu raring, and telling the
compiler to look in both dirs for system headers by default works
well, but there could be issues, e.g. if giving a path to a subdir
of a system header(?).
I'd be interested to hear of problems building against multiarched
-dev packages with moved headers. Are there any significant ones?
> we could support cross-compiling to anything with the same
> structure - I'm thinking MinGW-w64 here of course, but I imagine it would
> apply to other targets too, some of which are supported in Debian already
> using the /usr/triplet/include directories.
The header-layout issue is independent of the need for dpkg-architecture to know
about an arch to use multiarch mechanisms for cross-building to it. But
that's very easy to do (An easy way to add arches in a local config
file is something that's been mentioned before). Having mingw as an
arch is a good idea if it isn't already.
And you can still use a sysroot and non-multiarch ways of filling it
if you prefer. I haven't really experimented with multiarch and
sysroot at the same time but SFAICS it should work.
Wookey
--
Principal hats: Linaro, Emdebian, Wookware, Balloonboard, ARM
http://wookware.org/