Re: Cross-compiling for Win32

[Simon Richter <sjr@debian.org>]

Hi,

Ron wrote:

>> Another solution would be a big package like "mingw32-libs" which
>> is arch-independent and contains many small libraries for use
>> with the cross compiler of the existing Debian package "mingw32".
>> This solution wouldn't use any dpkg-cross mechanism, and it would
>> be much simpler.

I think that (at least in the long term) it makes sense to have a Debian
architecture for Windows and build *_win32.deb packages which can then
be converted into *-win32-cross_all.deb with dpkg-cross.

> This is how the wx-cross packages
> work, and I believe (more or less) how Simon has done his uclibc
> package.

Not quite. The uclibc package always builds arch-dependent packages for
the proper architecture, and I use dpkg-cross to build the arch-indep
packages.

> This can be a useful idiom for targets that have no existing
> Debian packages that would simply need their binaries relocated for
> cross builds.

We'd need lots of special handling for these architectures in the
packages, which I'd like to avoid.

> That's not really why the mingw package used to do this (and it does it
> much less now than it used to).  Back in the dreamtime mingw's ancestors
> would build most reliably with all the gnu tools aggregated into a
> single source tree.  Trying to build the toolchain components individually
> was both more complicated and more likely to fail.

Indeed. I have some proposals underway to allow that to happen, but it
will require some work.

   Simon