[Pkg-gnupg-maint] Bug#643341: libgpg-error-dev: cross-compiling anything based on libgpg-error is painful

[Helmut Grohne]

Hi Colin,

On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 01:15:27PM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> libgpg-error-dev ships its own gpg-error-config program which dependent
> packages are supposed to use.  Unfortunately this doesn't play
> particularly well with standard cross-build setups; nothing knows that
> per-architecture versions of gpg-error-config need to be installed in
> some kind of per-architecture path, so if you try to cross-build
> anything that build-depends on libgpg-error-dev (such as libgcrypt11) it
> fails because it tries to link against libgpg-error libraries for the
> architecture you're building on rather than the architecture you're
> building for.

I have problems reproducing this issue in rebootstrap[1].  Since
libgpg-error-dev is M-A:no, a cross builder will just pull in the host
version of libgpg-error-dev.  This actually works out quite well,
because gpg-error-config is a shell script and thus executable for the
build architecture.  Of course, this means that trying to use it in a
native compile will result in garbage.  Still crossing reverse build
dependencies of libgpg-error-dev such as libgcrypt11 or libgcrypt20 just
work in my experience.  Their configure scripts first check for
<triplet>-gpg-error-config, which is not found, and then fall back to
gpg-error-config, which works. So are you talking about cross building
in a packaging context (where I do not see a problem) or about cross
building for users (where there currently is no packaged toolchain)?

Thanks for clarifying

Helmut

[1] http://wiki.debian.org/HelmutGrohne/rebootstrap