Hello!
On Mon, 10 Jan 2022 20:44:31 +0100 Helmut Grohne <hel...@subdivi.de> wrote:
Source: talloc
Version: 2.3.3-2
Tags: patch
User: debian-cr...@lists.debian.org
Usertags: cross-satisfiability ftcbfs
talloc fails to cross build from source. I'm inclined to say it's
because waf. Really, stop using waf if you can. It's a nightmare.
Well, this is what samba is using for their build, and this is
where talloc and other libs (tevent, tdb, ldb) are coming from.
Samba is a large project with lots of inter-dependencies and
configurations. It looks like the samba project is comited
to using waf. I for one haven't used it before, and don't know
how to use it still, my attempts to understand how to do even
a minimal change in there all failed so far :)
But back to the bug report.
How important it really is to have an ability to cross-build talloc?
I understand it'd be nice to cross-build whole archive, - we're *far*
from there. Libraries like talloc - small - can be built natively
for now and used for cross-building larger packages. This works.
Just like you mentioned, adding cross-build support is quite difficult
and it will most likely bit-rot rather quickly too - who will look for
changes in important waf configuration?
Polemics aside. waf can be made to cross build if you export all the
build tools. Beyond the usual ones, you also need PYTHON3_CONFIG and
this magic _PYTHON_SYSCONFIGDATA_NAME variable. Of course, debian/rules
also needs to use it instead of calling python3-config directly. Beyond
that, a waf anser file is needed. And that's mostly it. Build-Depends
need to be multiarchified and the python3-talloc.lintian-overrides was
wrongly hard coding the amd64 triplet.
It really can be made to work. But is all this pain really worth it? How
about using like setuptools or something sane? Think about it. And if
all else fails, apply my patch.
How important it really is? This is just a question, I don't know why/how
crossbuilds are used at all, to start with.
Thanks!
/mjt
