Re: cross-build-essential

Wookey <[email protected]> writes:

> +++ Wookey [2012-01-19 14:32 +0000]:
>> +++ Neil Williams [2012-01-19 13:02 +0000]:
>> > On Thu, 19 Jan 2012 12:10:28 +0000
>> > Wookey <[email protected]> wrote:
>> > 
>> > > I've thought for a long time that a package like build-essential for
>> > > cross-building would be a really good idea. 
>> > 
>> > +1
>> > 
>> > It should probably depend on build-essential itself as a starting point.
>> 
>> I suppose so. You won't get far without that.
>
> OK, there has been progress in this area. Thanks to Patrick McDermmot
> (GSOC student) we have a patch to add support to build-essential for a
> crossbuild-essential-<arch> packages.
>
> http://odin1.pehjota.net/~pj/debian-bootstrap/build-essential/
>
> The initial patches there add crossbuild-essential packages to the
> build-essential source, which is easy to do but leads to some questions.
>
> 1) Some of the packages that cross-build-essential depends on (cross-compiler
> packages) are not yet in the archive, and won't be in wheezy. That
> means that these packages will not be installable and thus will not
> migrate from unstable until the cross-compiler packages do arrive.
>
> That seems like a very good reason to keep cross-build-essential as a
> separate source package for now, available from emdebian.org, along
> with the toolchains. Anyone disagree?

I wonder what the difference is between cross-build-essential and
build-essential in terms of packages and wether we need a seperate
package at all.

Say I want to have the build-essential for i386 installed on amd64.
I could install build-essential:i386, replacing gcc/g++:amd64 with
gcc/g++:i386. Wouldn't that give me everything needed to cross-compile
for i386?

That said wouldn't it make sense to have build-essential use

  Depends: g++:<arch> (>= <ver>) | g++-cross-<arch> (>= <ver>)

Since build-essential is architecture any it already pulls in the
foreign libraries needed for that arch. Only difference would be that
since g++:<foreign> conflicts with the g++:<native> frontends would
choose g++-cross-<arch> instead.

MfG
        Goswin