[Pkg-pascal-devel] status of cross-binutils

[Wookey]

On 2016-12-01 21:47 +0100, Paul Gevers wrote:
> Hi Wookey,
> 
> Recently I got a cross build bug against FPC filed.¹ The reported did
> quite some digging himself and apparently a part of the solution is to
> (alternatively) depend on binutils-i586-linux-gnu (for i386) and similar
> for other archs. However, that package isn't in stretch, so I can't go
> that route now. Looking that the tracker package of cross-binutils, it
> seems that cross-binutils predates the current building of cross
> binutils by the binutils source package itself, correct? Shouldn't
> cross-binutils be removed and couldn't/shouldn't binutils also build a
> i586 and x86_64 version?

cross-binutils does indeed predate the various <triplet>-binutils
packages in debian. However I think it still has a use because it
makes it easy to build <foo>-binutils flavours that are not currently
built in debian. I don't think we pre-build every possible combination
of cross binutils (although we do build most - this argument makes a
lot more sense for gcc where we only build binary packages for a
fairly small subset of the possible cross-compilers.)

Hmm. I see what you mean about binutils-i586-linux-gnu not being a
package built by binutils, but coming from cross-binutils. That does
seem like something we should drop, and just keep cross-binutils
around for things which are not mainstream (assuming there are any
viable combinations still missing. I hadn't realised this was still
the case. I'll do an upload to drop those binary packages, and file a
bug for binutils to create them.

There is work ongoing to make cross-dependencies on binutils (and gcc)
'just work' eventually. I'm not sure exactly where that has got to.
 
> ¹ https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=845498

I tried to read this bug, but I think I am missing too much context to
make much sense of it. FPC needs a cross-binutils to do its own
cross-builds, right?  And yes it needs <triplet>-binutils
(i.e. $DEB_TARGET_GNU_TYPE-binutils) to build stuff for
$DEB_TARGET_ARCH, not binutils:<DEB_TARGET_ARCH> because the former is
a _cross-binutils_, the latter is binutils to _run_ on
<DEB_TARGET_ARCH=DEB_HOST_ARCH> which is no use for crossing except in
the very limited case of something like i386 on amd64 where you happen
to be able to run both architectures/ABIs on the same machine.


Wookey
-- 
Principal hats:  Linaro, Debian, Wookware, ARM
http://wookware.org/
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