For those not subscribed to debian-devel-announce who may be watching the embedded list anyway: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2011/06/msg00002.html Multiarch conversion of libraries is starting in unstable. It's the beginning of the end for the whole -$arch-cross nightmare. The transition *is* likely to be painful, lots of things will break, lots of stuff in Debian and Emdebian Grip unstable will break - some things in Emdebian Grip testing may break too because we don't have primary control over testing migrations. Big transitions like this are the reason why we have STABLE - please use it as a safe haven. Cross-building on Multiarch is an unknown at the moment and the header files are not being handled, so it'll be a mixed up world for a while yet. First stop is fixing various upstream build system bugs which result from the MultiArch paths. i.e. a number of packages will stop building natively, let alone cross, during the transition. Native build bugs will, of course, be fixed quicker than cross but problems are inevitable. Things will break even before it is possible to use dpkg to install foreign architecture packages - i.e. before MultiArch is even at a point where it can be used for 32bit on 64bit support, let alone for armel on i386 etc. From now and until further notice, if you want reproducible results from any of these packages, *use stable repositories!* when obtaining the packages to pass through these tools: multistrap xapt pdebuild-cross dpkg-cross If you use these packages with unstable or Emdebian Grip testing, you are on your own. Seriously. The Emdebian team will be hard pushed even keeping up with the endpoint changes, let alone working out how to fix transient issues resulting from being in the middle of such a complex transition. From this point on, using an unofficial port is going to be incredibly risky because there will be no safety net. Packages will migrate to MultiArch, some of those will break and there will be missing dependencies and broken packages throughout unstable - as unofficial ports only have unstable, unofficial == broken_world. From now until further notice, if you want reproducible results from any of these packages, *use stable repositories!* when obtaining the packages themselves: cross-building toolchains debuggers MultiArch is a very large change, it has knock-on effects on every part of the Debian infrastructure and will radically change how Emdebian operates at all levels. (Possibly the biggest change in Debian since the last SONAME bump to libc.) MultiArch is also outside the control of any one person in Emdebian or even the entire Emdebian team. *Do not blame us when things break!* This is fair warning, MultiArch is happening, it WILL break something, somewhere, on virtually every cross-building system using Debian at some point - quite possibly more than once - if you don't heed the warning and switch to getting your packages from Squeeze. MultiArch will also break Debian unstable from time to time, so you may need to handle that as well. The benefits of MultiArch are immense but the temporary pain could be severe and it starts now. Please, *use Squeeze* or Lenny until further notice. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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