Re: Experience building toolchain for armel on i686

[Jonathan Schultz <jonathan@imatix.com>]

> OK, but the gcc-4.3 toolchain for i386 has been available for ARM and
> armel for, literally, years.

OK. Obviously I was stumbling around in the dark and hit upon the bright 
idea of building the toolchain as a possible solution.

I'm going to install Debian on a virgin machine in the next week or so, 
which might be the chance to try all this out again without the 
pollution from all the trial and error of the past still lying around.

 I'm still a little confused about why you
> had to use emchain at all. It sounds like there was a problem with
> apt-cross (which was probably trying to find gcc-4.4) which led to the
> comment about emchain in the emsetup output. Please file a wishlist bug
> against emsetup for that one - I'm going to have to reconsider
> recommending emchain if emsetup fails or maybe just leave the
> recommendation in the manpage where there is more room for a
> discussion about why you would use emchain at all.

I'm not sure what you mean here. Which comment about emchain in the 
emsetup output? I don't think (scratches head trying to remember) I even 
used emsetup.  I just found this: 
http://linux.codehelp.co.uk/emdebian/man/re02.html and took it from there.

> That's because with slower machines, it can take a day for emchain to
> complete. (Yes, it really did - I wrote emchain on a machine that took
> a day to complete a run of emchain.)

Sure.  Maybe worth a request to extend rather than overwrite an existing 
log?

> So does Qtopia now build with the toolchain you built?

It seems to.  In any case the result is no worse than the one built 
natively on the Freerunner itself.

> IIRC Qtopia doesn't cross-build - at least, not in a sane way. (This
> isn't unusual, you should expect most free software to *not* be
> cross-buildable in the first instance. There are probably only 20 or so
> packages in all of Debian that actually cross-build without
> modification.)

Oh?  The README files with Qtopia make reference to cross-building so I 
guess the required work has been done.  I didn't realise packages had to 
be designed specifically for cross-building.

Cheers,
Jonathan