Re: arm-linux-gnu-* vs arm-linux-*

[Martin Fuzzey <mfuzzey@gmail.com>]

Hello,
Lisandro Damián Nicanor Pérez Meyer wrote:
> Hello everyone. I would like to ask in which ways I could tackle this prolem.
>
> I am compiling qt 4 embedded for arm. The makespecs of Qt 4 uses arm-linux-* 
> while dpkg-cross' uses arm-linux-gnu-*. So, I need to make a change somewhere 
> to make things work.
>
> One idea would be to patch Qt's makespecs in order to make it compile with 
> dpkg-cross' default names.
>
> Other posibility would be to make soft links in /usr/bin/, so making available 
> both conventions.
>
> Do you have any other ideas o suggestions?
>
>   
This depends somewhat on how you are trying to use Emdebian.

If you just want to use Emdebian as a toolchain provider for your
development workstation (ie you're not going to be running Emdebian on
your embedded device, just cross compiling things on your workstation
and somehow making a root filesystem for your embedded device yourself)
either of the options you suggest will work. Personally I would patch
the makefile rather than creating symlinks as I don't like to "pollute"
the system environment but prefer to keep things related to building
some piece of software local to that software. That method also has the
advantage of not requiring root permissions. If you do go the symlink
route it's better to create them in /usr/local/bin as /usr/bin on Debian
systems is supposed to be reserved for files created by Debian packages.

On the other hand if you actually want to use Emdebian on your embedded
system this means that you will have to build an Emdebian package for
qt4-embedded. There are two types of Emdebian packages "crush" and
"grip" but in both cases the starting point is an existing Debian
package. Currently however qt4-embedded (unlike "normal" qt4 [called
qt4-x11]) is not packaged by Debian. So you would have to :
1) create a Debian package from the qt-embedded tarball.
2) create an Emdebian package from the above.

The above could mean quite a lot of work; it depends, among other things:
  * what dependencies are required and are they already packaged
  * how different the qt-embedded buildsystem is to qt-x11
  * how much experience you have with Debian and Emdebian packaging [qt
is _not_ a good package to tackle first if you've never done this before]

For 1) see http://debian.org/doc/manuals/maint-guide/
For 2) see http://wiki.debian.org/EmdebianQuickStart

Good luck,

Martin