[Pkg-samba-maint] Bug#1003477: talloc FTCBFS: it's difficult

[Michael Tokarev]

Hello!

On Mon, 10 Jan 2022 20:44:31 +0100 Helmut Grohne <helmut at subdivi.de> wrote:
> Source: talloc
> Version: 2.3.3-2
> Tags: patch
> User: debian-cross at 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