On Thu, Mar 09, 2023 at 08:18:24PM +0100, Timo Röhling wrote: > Given that meson and cmake are also part of the toolchain > build-essential set (just like debhelper), would it not be better to > have a separate cross-toolchain-helper package that provides such > generators for all supported build systems?
Indeed none of meson, cmake and debhelper are build-essential. I think we've vaguely tried that with cross-config, which happens to still be pulled by sbuild, but not by pbuilder. I recommend not repeating this. For another thing, keep in mind that Debian is not the only user of such functionality. My original approach to this was adding debcrossgen to meson, but Jussi Pakkanen argued in favour of including it in meson proper and now it is "meson env2mfile" - a core meson functionality. Users (or CI) building stuff on Debian systems but without a Debian package is thus enabled to use Debian's cross build infrastructure in an easy way: meson env2mfile knows how Debian works and will produce a suitable crossfile. > I'd say that is a matter of personal preference. It is certainly > more convenient for developers who need to invoke cmake manually, > but in effect, it is not much different from the current "inline" > approach. While I appreciate "there is more than one way to do it", there also is value in "There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it." An ind this case, my impression is that the world is converging towards the other way (from Debian point of view). The question kinda is how accurate that impression is. Hence, I think that if we're going to change the way we pass cross flags to cmake, we should do it like meson does by providing a tool inside the cmake package. Helmut
