Re: Dropping emchain in experimental, failure of apt-cross
+++ Hector Oron [2010-10-03 22:42 +0100]:
>
>
> Looking forward for `xapt'. Is `xapt' goal to be `pdebuild-cross'
> chain dependency solver or also it aims to be `apt-cross' replacement
> in Wheezy?
Good question.
New apt provides one big chunk of the apt-cross functionality -
downloading and managing package files for multiple architectures. So
now it is trivial to have multiplt arch packages files present,
updated and interrogated, just using apt.
That still leaves a need for a tool to get cross-dependencies. xapt
can do this but because it gets every possible thing it is quite slow
and will fill your system up with crap so should really only be used
in disposable chroots.
xdeb can do what apt-cross did and has a lot of heuristics to try and
get it right, but right now it doesn't work in quite a lot of cases and
isn't in Debian (not much point uploading it until it works a bit
better IMHO). It also doesn't separate the dependency-satisfying and
the building, which makes it difficul for other tools (like
buildcross) to use it.
Proper cross-dep metadata in packages will help this process
enormously - I hope there will some movement on that front over the
next few months.
As soon as we have that info xapt and xdeb will be able to use it.
I think that once packages are made multiarch-compliant that
cross-build-deps just fall out of what apt does outomatically, so no
separate tool is needed. That remains to be proven as a mechanism.
So all in all, exactly how things are going to work after squeeze
remins unclear. There should be something more like a plan emerging
later this month, at least from the Linaro/Ubuntu view of the world.
Wookey
--
Principal hats: Linaro, Emdebian, Wookware, Balloonboard, ARM
http://wookware.org/
Reply to: