Bug#990305: Introduce ARC support in Perl cross-compiling for Debian

[Helmut Grohne]

Hi Niko,

TL;DR: This is a kludge, not a solution.

On Fri, Aug 27, 2021 at 10:38:12PM +0300, Niko Tyni wrote:
> I assume "tested in rebootstrap build" means the package builds, but
> did anybody test the resulting packages?

I certainly did not. In particular, the main line of rebootstrap does
not cross build perl.

> I'm copying Helmut. Do you have any suggestions? Should I just take this
> in and leave it to porters to worry about breakage?

I don't have an opinion here. Personally, I do not consider the way perl
performs cross builds sustainable. That is the reason why rebootstrap
still does not cross build perl to this date.

I still believe that the way to cross build perl is to make Configure
(mostly) work for cross builds. The biggest step towards that has
already been performed by generating Configure from source. Thank you. I
believe that we can now rework it (and in part this has already happened
upstream) to need less and less run tests. At some point, we'll reach a
small and maintainable set of test results that does not have to be
regenerated with every perl release.

> BTW, our development is currently targeting 5.34 so somebody needs to
> port this. I'm not sure if there will be another 5.32 upload before
> we get 5.34 in unstable.

That is why I find it unsustainable.

If you deem the effort for updating those files for arc ok, so be it.
>From my pov, it would be sufficient to start shipping them for arc once
it becomes a ports architecture using the usual machinery.

Helmut