Re: Bug#693730: dpkg-cross: Add arm64 support

On Mon, 19 Nov 2012 19:18:58 +0000
Wookey <[email protected]> wrote:

> Package: dpkg-cross
> Version: 2.6.7
> Severity: normal
> 
> This patch adds arm64 support to dpkg-cross. It also adds some new
> packages and moves a few core variables to be global as they appear in
> a lof of entries. 

Migrating a few variables is fine, I wasn't sure if you were proposing
moving the majority / all variables before I was able to see the
patch. :-)

One day, we'll finally get to drop CORBA too. Seems anachronistic
somehow to be building arm64 CORBA.

> I realise this is a bit of a mish-mash, but it represents the current
> state of the package as I have been updating it working through the
> arm64 port. And it's better to be filed in a bugrep than sat on my disk.

Agreed.

arm64 support is definitely good to have but I'm not certain if this
needs to go into unstable during the freeze - I'm thinking experimental
for now. That should at least make it possible to get some arm64
packages cross-built and then -cross'd.

> Not all of this is thoroughly tested but it's cetainly better than
> without. I believe the whole package is in need of some updating in
> the various architectures for consistency, and globalising some more
> 'core things'. But of course this is very hard to do unless one has
> an easy way of testing the results on many architectures.

The original data mostly came from ARMv4 for Emdebian Crush, so testing
on multiple architectures is a new thing but well worth doing. (If that
is only armel + armhf then it's probably not going to show anything.)

Architectures like hppa which don't include the cross-config.cache file
currently could be considered for removal, along with alpha, arm (v4),
armeb, m68k, sh3, sh3eb, sh4, sh4eb or some permutation of those.

> If you accept the idea that _some_ variables could be declared
> globally then I suggest we cautiously do that for things we are pretty
> sure are the same everywhere and will not break other package builds.
> It can always be reverted if problems are found later.
> 
> More automated cross-build infrastructure will help weed out such
> issues. 

That would be very nice to have...

-- 


Neil Williams
=============
http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/

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