Re: Bug#693220: Add crossbuild-essential support

On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 12:08:26PM +0000, Wookey wrote:
> Following on from discussion in this thread
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-embedded/2012/06/msg00030.html
> 
> The cross-build-essential package has been developed some more and
> tested in Quantal for arm64 bootstrap, and armel and armhf builds. It
> works nicely. We definitely want to start using this.
> 
> The latest code is available at: 
> http://people.debian.org/~wookey/bootstrap/ubunturepo/pool/main/c/cross-build-essential/

I think it would be a good idea to put this in build-essential, but I
have one concern.  At the moment this uses "Depends: libc6-dev:armhf"
(etc.).  The multiarch spec currently explicitly says that Depends on
PKG:ARCH for a particular architecture (as opposed to PKG:any) is
undefined.  I'm therefore a bit worried that adding such syntax to
build-essential would cause some bit of archive machinery to explode; it
certainly results in a Lintian error.  That said, it apparently works in
simple sbuild chroot situations.  CCing -embedded and -dpkg for advice.

The other possibility is to add bridging dependencies by way of
artificial package names that only exist on one architecture, e.g.:

  Package: libc6-armhf-cross
  Architecture: any
  Depends: libc6-armhf

  Package: libc6-armhf
  Architecture: armhf
  Multi-Arch: foreign
  Depends: libc6

  Package: libc6
  Architecture: any
  Multi-Arch: same

That's not without its own problems, though; it bloats Packages and
(last I checked) it requires manually forcing britney to accept it into
testing.  If it's possible to use the :ARCH syntax instead, that would
be better.

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [[email protected]]