Re: RFC: cross toolchain and Debian
On Wed, Sep 12, 2001 at 05:40:21PM -0700, David Kimdon wrote:
> > It is a tremendous time
> > investment on the part of tools maintainers.
>
> It will be some extra time, but I believe that if we go the source and
> not the binary route the time investment will be limited.
>
> Think of it like Debian kernel packages. We provide make-kpkg because
> we know that we cannot provide a kernel that makes everyone happy but
> it is nice to use the packaging system to maintain local kernels.
>
> This is the same thing. If I want i386 -> powerpc to work I might
> have to debug it, just like I might have to debug my 3dVoodfxBanshee
> graphics accellerator.
This adds a great deal of complexity to every rules file, however.
It's a maintenance burden.
> > Building packages this way, in general, is NOT feasible.
> agreed, I'm trying to fix that too, see http://bugs.debian.org/111839
Sorry, but a policy patch addresses whether it's supposed to work, not
whether it is feasible. They're two completely different issues.
> > MontaVista
> > (my day job) has patches to cross compile about two hundred Debian
> > packages, and we're slowly feeding them back; they're invasive, and
> > exceedingly ugly.
>
> I'm not convinced that they need to be ugly and invasive, I hope I'm
> not wrong.
Having spent the past year and some working on Hard Hat Linux, which is
completely cross-built, I'm absolutely convinced that you are wrong.
Even packages which properly use autoconf need a great deal of work to
cross-configure properly.
--
Daniel Jacobowitz Carnegie Mellon University
MontaVista Software Debian GNU/Linux Developer
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