I'm cc'ing this to debian-policy, because the issue in the subject line seems like an important general question.
To summarize (http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=176627): I reported a bug for mingw32 (a Linux->Windows cross-compiler) because the developer had declared it architecture-dependent for no technical reason that I could understand, and I wanted to run it on Debian/powerpc. He (Ron Lee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>) responded: > Well.. spirit or none there are such things as unsupported architectures. > > That said though, you are quite correct in that there should be no > technical reasons why it should remain that way for this package. > From a practical point of view though, this is unlikely to change > in the near future unless you either: > > a) do the work. > b) find someone else with the right hardware prepared to do the work. > c) buy me a fast new PPC laptop. > > I can quite sympathise with what you want, but I'm not going to > make this package arch-any just so it can break on every arch > except i386 (and hence keep it out of testing for everyone). > That's not the sort of equality we're aiming for. Actually, I thought that *was* the sort of equality Debian was aiming for...if it breaks for any architecture, it's a serious problem that everyone has to deal with. If every Debian developer refused to support architectures he/she didn't have immediate access to, non-x86 Debian would disappear pretty quickly. Of course, it's a different matter if the upstream package is inherently non-portable (written in x86 assembler for an x86 target, for example); I can understand the need for architecture-dependent packages in that case... Here, however, the only code that is actually compiled for a non-x86 host is gcc/binutils--and if they don't work as a cross-compiler on a supported platform like ppc, it's a serious bug that needs to be passed upstream. The mingw32-runtime, etc., are all cross-compiled for an x86 host, so if they compile somewhere they should compile anywhere (if not, it's a gcc bug). > Realistically, probably the best I can offer is that if you can > give me a confirmed successful build report, I'll add PPC to the > list of target arches. If not, I'd suggest you talk to the folks > at mingw.org about their procedures for accepting patches.. :-) Done. I'm using the packages from unstable. As I expected, there were no intrinsic portability problems...the only obstacles were in the packaging. mingw32-binutils built & installed with no problems. The main problem with mingw32 and mingw32-runtime, of course, is the circular dependency. I understand the reason for this, but to get things up and running I just manually unpacked the mingw32-runtime i386 package and copied the files onto my system, deleted the dependencies from debian/control, built & installed mingw32, re-built mingw32-runtime, deleted the copied runtime, then installed the runtime .deb. The right thing to do, however, is to simply tag the mingw32-runtime package as architecture-independent, because it is! I learned the hard way, by the way, that mingw32-runtime from Debian/stable does not work (there's a missing library, I forget which); you need to put a version number in mingw32's Build-Depends. Also, there is a bug in mingw32's debian/rules file: you used $(target)-strip to strip {cc1,cc1plus,cpp0,tradcpp0}, which is incorrect since those are host binaries, not target (i586) binaries. I changed that line to use 'strip' (probably you should use dh_strip). Otherwise it went smoothly, and the resulting .deb's (built for Debian/testing) are at: http://jdj.mit.edu/~stevenj/mingw32/ Given the corrections above, there is no reason why mingw32 won't build as-is on every Debian architecture. (If it doesn't, it's a bug in gcc.) I hope this can happen in the near future. Steven
