Re: Multiarch capabilities for mingw crossbuilds too?
+++ Joerg Desch [2014-08-08 05:38 +0000]:
> Today I've read about Debians Multiarch capabilities for the first time.
> Is it possible to use this technique to build deb packages of libraries
> for the mingw crosscompile toolchain too?
In principle, yes. In practice right now, no. Stephen Kitt has looked
into this and gave a comprehensive talk at this year's mini-debconf
(But I can't find a URL as I'm not sure that Sylvestre has actually
uploaded them anywhere). I think this pdf is the slides though:
http://www.sk2.org/talks/crossporting-to-windows.pdf
It has the potential to be exceedingly slick and remove a whole load
of packaging cruft we currently have to make windows/mingw-ready versions of
libraries.
There is some discussion on this therad:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2011/04/msg01243.html
> I have to build Windows executables and therefore need some libraries.
> For now, I build and install them locally. It would be fine to have a
> way just to apt-get install them.
>
> Any chance?
Yes, but it needs some work. I'm sure Stephen would love some help :-)
I don't know if he's made any progress since feb.
The trickiest part is that, having demonstrated that this works, we
would have to change the definition of 'architecture independent' a
little to include 'posix/non-posix' which mostly means moving a lot of
libc stuff from arch-independent locations to arch-dependent
locations, and that might be a hard sell in Debian. It _should_ only
affect libc packaging, but work needs to be done to demonstrate
that. Everything else is straightforward, and indeed a simplification of the current state for any package that produces win32/64 libs.
Wookey
--
Principal hats: Linaro, Emdebian, Wookware, Balloonboard, ARM
http://wookware.org/
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