Re: Why does dpkg-shlibdeps look at the target architecture?

Hi Helmut,

On Wed, 09 Jul 2025, Helmut Grohne wrote:
> In Dpkg/Shlibs.pm in sub setup_library_paths, there is the following 
> code:
[...]
> It is not clear to us, why that first branch exists. It was originally 
> added by Raphaël in support of cross compilation and later changed a 
> couple of times.

So this part was added as part of the discussion in this bug report:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=453267

>From what I remember, that first branch was specifically in support
of building cross compilers.

I don't have recent knowledge of cross-building and cross-compilers
so I have no idea whether that's still useful in some cases or not.

> I attempted a full architecture cross bootstrap (for m68k as it is 
> quick) with that first branch deleted and it succeeded. I also attempted 
> a hurd-amd64 bootstrap on amd64 with it deleted and then 
> cpp-14-x86-64-gnu become installable.

The right thing to try to validate whether we can remove the code is
building a cross-compiler (and not cross-building a compiler).

Cheers,