Re: apt-cross and xapt

[Jim Heck <jim.heck@oracle.com>]

> 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?

Thanks, I will try using xapt this week.

No a single step will work just fine for my purposes.  I was merely 
following the older wiki documentation for building the cross tools, 
which separated the steps between apt-cross and dpkg-cross.  Ultimately 
the flexibility would be good in Wheezy, but I understand the time 
constraints for Squeeze.

> 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.

So long as the dependencies are available and complete I don't foresee 
any problem with the full automation.  It is only when things go wrong 
that the finer controls become needed (usually in the form of override 
to ignore errors).  I was already forcing dpkg-cross using -A, to 
install some unneeded packages to get around some build dependency 
checking issues in the toolchain packages, so installing all should be 
fine for me.

-Jim