Hooray for deadlines: https://wiki.debian.org/ReleaseGoals/CrossToolchains
Cross Toolchains in the archive =============================== Debian has long had useful cross-building support, but has never had general cross-compilers for release architectures in the archive. They have always been built by users, or by outside entities like the long-standing emdebian.org cross-compiler collection. It would be a lot more convenient for users if cross-toolchains were available within the archive like any other package. We already have good support in dpkg, apt and sbuild for cross-building, and installation of cross build-dependencies. And support for autotools and cmake cross-setup in dpkg-cross. It just needs the cross-toolchain packages themselves and some support bit and pieces to make cross-building very slick in Debian. Much of this work has already been demonstrated in Ubuntu and it would be good to get it properly upstream. The Cross Toolchain team on Alioth was re-invigorated at Debconf13 to get this work done. Details ------- The thing that has kept cross-compilers out for many years is that the build has cross-architecture dependencies (needs libc:$DEB_HOST_ARCH and libgcc:$DEB_HOST_HOST). Now that Multi-arch is done this problem can be cleanly solved. It is possible to build cross-compilers without multiarch support, as has been demonstrated in Ubuntu but using it provides cleaner support and simpler packaging. Implementation -------------- * The hard parts have already been done in the Multiarch support. * The cross-toolchain builds should not be part of the normal binutils and gcc packaging, as the large matrix of builds (potentially up to the square of all architectures, fortunately many are not really useful) provides too many opportunities for build failures which would get in the way of normal gcc and binutils updates. * Buildds need to allow cross-architecture dependencies. This was agreed in a multi-arch meeting at Banja Luka * Adding a crossbuild-essential package to easily bring in the right packages is very helpful, but not essential. * A crossbuild-support package (or similar name) should be made from the useful parts of dpkg-cross, keeping the autoconf and cmake variable setup and cache seeding, but dropping the library-munging functionality. Resources -------- Advocates: Wookey Doko Pabs mailing list: [email protected] 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]
