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Re: apt-cross and xapt



On Sun, 17 Oct 2010 12:42:43 -0400
Jim Heck <pinball.rules@gmail.com> wrote:

> I'm sorry if I don't fully follow the ramifications of what you are 
> proposing, as my current needs for apt-cross are relatively simple,
> so I will just describe them.  I have not yet tried xapt, so I don't
> know exactly how it works, but my primary use of apt-cross is to
> allow me to pull the libraries I need to cross-build binutils and the
> gcc-4.4 compiler, which I then transform using dpkg-cross and install
> so that I can do the cross-build. 

apt-cross currently calls dpkg-cross for you if you give the -b
command, it will call dpkg-cross and ask dpkg-cross to install the
results if you specify the -i command, or just download the .deb files
if you give the -d command.

xapt will download, pass to dpkg-cross and ask dpkg-cross to install
the results - it currently doesn't support merely downloading packages
for manual conversion with dpkg-cross. It's all or nothing. That might
change in Wheezy. Time is short to do that for Squeeze.

> I guess if apt-cross went away and
> xapt was unable to perform this function I could get by just
> downloading the needed debs manually from the appropriate repository,
> but it would be nice if the Squeeze release has some tool that allows
> me to do this by harnessing the apt infrastructure.

xapt is already in Squeeze as part of the pdebuild-cross package:

$ sudo apt-get install pdebuild-cross
$ man xapt
$ /usr/share/pdebuild-cross/xapt --help

The change is to enhance xapt and put it into /usr/bin but the enhanced
version will still only support installation, not just downloading.

xapt is faster, cleaner and much simpler than apt-cross. It does this
by dropping most of the complexity of apt-cross and therefore some of
the functionality.

Is there are reason you want only to download and convert manually?

Note that xapt does not support excluding certain packages from
conversion - this is the main source of bugs in apt-cross and the main
reason for it's removal. xapt downloads and converts all dependencies,
even those which dpkg-cross would not normally convert. It doesn't
actually matter, as it turns out, at least until we can replace the
whole package-renaming-cross-hack with a sane method.

-- 


Neil Williams
=============
http://www.data-freedom.org/
http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
http://e-mail.is-not-s.ms/

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