Hello, Some while ago Riku asked me to update cross tools, but I had run into some real life issues. Anyway, currently, cross toolchains way of compiling is a bit uncertain and I would like to know your comments based on your needs.
Let me explain, current way of building (lenny) depends on dpkg-cross which we want to remove from the archive (not sure when, after multiarch maybe). So we need to bootstrap cross tools, which has been implemented at emdebian.org/git/buildcross.git. The only problem is to do the bootstrap eglibc and gcc have circular depends and they need several builds before they provide a useful binary. There are two orthogonal options to build our unstable toolchain (multiarch or sysroot or sysroot+multiarch). Plus there are three diferent ways this could be implemented.a) Cross tools as an output of main Debian source package (as lenny). Quite good when working with several arches (these share same code). Some native maintainers, as gcc/binutils would prefer not having cross builds output from its native package.
b) Cross tools as an output of new source packages build depending on -source binaries. One source package per component (eglibc,binutils,gcc-X.Y,linux-libc-dev). Which makes lots of packages to maintain 4 or 5 (if we add gdb) per architecture and if we add uclibc and other non-official arches this list of packages could grown over a 100 source packages. c) Cross tools as an output of one source package. Each target architecture would only have one source package containing all the components. This way makes it more practical than b) but it means we need to rebuild all the tools each time one component updates. I would like to know if users have any comment on these issues. b) and c) makes us independent from native maintainers, so if fine with everybody I might start working on c). About sysroot and multiarch, any comments? We might keep current layout for some time (without multiarch nor sysroot) as dpkg-cross does not support sysroot and multiarch is not ready yet. But comments from users are welcome to get ready near future toolchains. If you need to know more on sysroot or multiarch affecting cross tools, visit: http://wiki.debian.org/toolchain-multiarch How would you like future cross tools to behave? Please note sysroot is an upstream solution while multiarch is a Debian/Ubuntu proposal. Kind Regards, -- Héctor Orón "Our Sun unleashes tremendous flares expelling hot gas into the Solar System, which one day will disconnect us."
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