> It is a tremendous time > investment on the part of tools maintainers.
It will be some extra time, but I believe that if we go the source and not the binary route the time investment will be limited. Think of it like Debian kernel packages. We provide make-kpkg because we know that we cannot provide a kernel that makes everyone happy but it is nice to use the packaging system to maintain local kernels. This is the same thing. If I want i386 -> powerpc to work I might have to debug it, just like I might have to debug my 3dVoodfxBanshee graphics accellerator. > > > build/install gcc-core-x.x.x, then build/install glibc-x.x, > > then build gcc-x.x.x > > Not as simple as it sounds. I've been through the process. It doesn't always go smoothly, that's part of why the binary packages won't fly, you have to really want it. > > Building packages this way, in general, is NOT feasible. agreed, I'm trying to fix that too, see http://bugs.debian.org/111839 > MontaVista > (my day job) has patches to cross compile about two hundred Debian > packages, and we're slowly feeding them back; they're invasive, and > exceedingly ugly. I'm not convinced that they need to be ugly and invasive, I hope I'm not wrong. -David
