On Wed, Sep 12, 2001 at 05:40:21PM -0700, David Kimdon wrote: > > 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.
This adds a great deal of complexity to every rules file, however. It's a maintenance burden. > > Building packages this way, in general, is NOT feasible. > agreed, I'm trying to fix that too, see http://bugs.debian.org/111839 Sorry, but a policy patch addresses whether it's supposed to work, not whether it is feasible. They're two completely different issues. > > 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. Having spent the past year and some working on Hard Hat Linux, which is completely cross-built, I'm absolutely convinced that you are wrong. Even packages which properly use autoconf need a great deal of work to cross-configure properly. -- Daniel Jacobowitz Carnegie Mellon University MontaVista Software Debian GNU/Linux Developer
