+++ Neil Williams [2012-02-23 13:42 +0000]: > On Thu, 23 Feb 2012 14:16:42 +0100 > Svante Signell <[email protected]> wrote: > > > On Thu, 2012-02-23 at 13:03 +0000, Neil Williams wrote: > > > You don't need cross-build tools for that. Your doing a native build, > > > so just use the normal Debian packaging tools (dpkg-buildpackage) and > > > build for hurd-i386. > > > > I'm doing that natively for most packages already. Some packages are > > problematic though, so maybe a cross-build can be of use. > > How? When a package will not build natively, it won't cross build > either.
I don't think that's necessarily true - it depends on the details (implementation language, significance of architecture differences in tool ouput). > > > > b) And to enable support for gnat in GNU/Hurd, either as a deb or > > > > binaries created by the cross-build environment and copied to the target > > > > for native .deb builds there. > > > > > > Forget about linux-i386/hurd-i386 cross-building and just change the > > > package in such a way that it can build a minimal .deb which provides > > > enough functionality without the complicating dependencies, such that > > > you can then build the next stage. Cross-building is not the answer > > > here and even if you are convinced it is, Emdebian cannot provide the > > > toolchains to do it. > > > > I think cross-building is the _only_ answer here since gnat needs gnat, > > see my previous mail. > > No, we've been here before in Emdebian. When foo needs foo, foo needs > to be modified to build mini-foo which doesn't need extra stuff, and > provides just enough functionality to allow mini-foo to be installed > (natively) and then support the building of another foo before you maybe > go on and build the full foo. THis only works if mini-foo is in a language you already have a compiler for. So it works for perl, which has a core written in C. It doesn't work for mono, which has its core written in mono, for example. > perl does this, compilers do this. The issue with cross-building is > that you cannot run the binaries compiled as cross binaries on the > system which is doing the build. So the best solution here is to build > natively, building only a small subset of the functionality. You can't build a language natively if you haven't yet bootstrapped that language on the target architecture. Sometimes cross-bootstrapping is the only way to get started. (if the version of tha language built on another architecure (the BUILD arch) is sufficiently compatible to be used to compile/intepret the language on the HOST arch. Usually it is because there has to be _some_ way of bootstrapping the language. Several languages have this property: haskell, mono, and I think java too. I know nothing about ada, which is the question here. But so far as I can tell it doesn't have a core C implmentation so you have to have an ada compiler in order to build it. A cross-gnat compiler seems like the only general way to get such a thing, (on x86 linux->hurd it may be possible to bodge something with the existing i386-linux-gnu ada compiler, assuming there is some mechanism for running linux binaries on the hurd?) > Identifying the subset is the hard part. > > Even if you do a cross-build, you're still going to need to build this > mini-foo subset natively in order to execute it during the cross-build > of the rest of the package. No. other way round. You may have to cross-build mini-foo in order to be able to natively build either foo or more probably mini-foo natively. Wookey -- Principal hats: Linaro, Emdebian, Wookware, Balloonboard, ARM http://wookware.org/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
