Re: Cross-toolchains for Jessie available
On Saturday 29. November 2014 01.50.30 Wookey wrote:
> After a long period of brokenness, cross-toolchains for debian are back.
>
> We dropped the ball rather over Wheezy as we expected new
> multiarch-built cross-toolchains to be ready much sooner than this so
> failed to take care of wheezy properly which has been a pain for a lot
> of people. Sorry about that.
>
> However there are now some working cross-toolchains again, in time for
> Jessie. These did not make it into Jessie proper, due to
> infrastructure changes which are needed for packages with cross-arch
> dependencies, but the deadline did provide the impetus to get it all
> working.
>
> These are essentially the same packages that have been available from
> secretsauce.net for much of 2014, but covering more architectures.
Thanks for doing this! I see that i386 is now provided for those of us still
using older hardware.
[...]
> The same cross-toolchains are also available in unstable, but are not
> always installable due to multiarch skew (after a new gcc, libc or
> linux upload). And they have caused some controversy so expect changes
> and instability. Also mips is currently broken as the native compiler
> didn't build in the current upload.
What is the status here? I see that only amd64 packages are available, which
is fairly unusual for Debian where the aim is usually to support all available
architectures.
With this in mind, I decided to try and build the cross-gcc-4.9-mipsel source
package with pbuilder, having installed the build prerequisites. I had to
manually add the foreign architecture within the pbuilder chroot in order to
satisfy dependencies:
sudo /usr/sbin/pbuilder --login --save-after-login
dpkg --add-architecture mipsel
apt-get update
Otherwise, various :mipsel dependencies cannot be resolved and you get strange
suggestions. Here's one example:
----
Package libc6-dev:mipsel is not available, but is referred to by another
package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
However the following packages replace it:
libc6-dev-amd64 libc-dev-bin
----
If there's a proper way of doing this multi-arch setup with pbuilder, it would
be useful to know.
Fortunately, the build process completed successfully, suggesting that there
is nothing (at the moment of writing) *technically* preventing the toolchain
from being built for at least i386 in unstable, and hopefully for other
architectures too.
I'll press on with the unstable toolchains, since they are presumably the
future of cross-building on Debian. However, thanks again for making packages
available for jessie and for i386, and thanks to those who got the toolchains
ready for unstable, too!
Paul
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