On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 03:40:52PM +0000, Neil Williams wrote: > On Wed, 16 Jan 2013 13:50:17 +0000 > Ian Jackson <ijack...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote: > > Is it possible that packages might only cross build for certain > > targets ? Or only for certain hosts ?
In my reply I'm going to use autoconf terminology, so host => architecture built for, and target => only relevant when talking about cross-tools themselves. (Not everyone likes this terminology, but it is widespread and autoconf tends to do a better job than virtually any other build system at supporting cross-building so I tend to end up preferring its terms.) > For certain host architectures: yes, definitely. Any source package > which includes assembly (there are more than most people expect) and any > package which then has a build dependency on a binary package > built from the source package(s) containing assembly and so on. Such packages would typically fail to build natively for the architecture in question too. I think it's more interesting to consider cases where, of the set of architectures on which a package can be built natively, it can cross-build to some of those host architectures but not others. However, I can't think of any such packages right now, although no doubt anything is possible; at least, it seems to me to be rare enough not to be worth inventing metadata for. I suspect that most such instances will be where packages only cross-build to "similar enough" architectures, e.g. where you happen to have a multilib toolchain available, so amd64 to i386, or perhaps architectures with the same bit length and/or endianness. In other words, such bugs would be a function of the combination of build and host architectures, rather than just of the host architecture. (I haven't run into many of these, since I cross-build from amd64 to armhf and they're fairly different.) Neil, can you think of any packages that meet this stricter criterion? -- Colin Watson [cjwat...@debian.org] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130116175500.gd3...@riva.dynamic.greenend.org.uk
