[Soc-coordination] Report #5 (Final Report) - Automated Multi-Arch Cross-Building and Bootstrapping

[Gustavo Alkmim]

Project: Automated Multi-Arch Cross-Building and Bootstrapping
Report #5 - Aug 1th to Aug 22th

1) Summary
The initial objective of this project was to break the cyclic build
dependencies presents on debian packages needed to make a multi-arch
cross-buildind bootstrap of a debian system and after it produce a tool to
automate all the bootstrap process. In the Debconf'11 the automate tool
received special attemption of a group that probabily are going to do this
work. So I concentrated on break the build dependencies cycles. Since the
cross-build is a very hard task and the packages sources causes a lot of
problems while crossbuild, I broke the armel loop and made a lot of patchs
to solve the cross-build problems of the sources packages.

2) What have been done during all the coding period:
Since the begging of the project I spent a lot of time trying to understand
how to prepare a system capable of crossbuild tools necessaries to
cross-build source packages. Also I spent a lot of time trying to solve a
lot compile/build errors present on the  source packages. As a result of my
work I produce patchs that solves all cycles present on the armel
architecture and a lot of patchs that solves the cross-build problems of
some source packages. Also I produced a script that helps on find the cycles
of a given architecture. All the patchs, script and cross-builded .deb
produced may be found on [1].

3) How far I have gone from the initial plans:
The original plains was to solve all cycles present in all architectures and
produce a tool to automate the bootstrap process. But a lot of problems
apeeared while cross-building the packages and I spent a lot of time
producing patchs for these source packages. So, the focus of the project
chenged a bit. I didn't conclude exactly what have been planned but I did
some extra important and necessary things as described before.

4) What could be done as a future works:
As a future work we intend to finish to brake all cycles from other
architectures and patch all source packages needed to bootstrap a debian
system in order to be able to cross-build all bootstrap packages without
have "surprises" like a compile error.

[1] http://pillars.lrc.ic.unicamp.br/~alkmim/gsoc2011/

Finnaly, I want to thanks Wookey (my mentor) for his help and all the Debian
community (Michael Vogt in special)  that helped me a lot too. Certainly I
want to keep work on the debian multiarch, specially on this problem.

Cheers,

Gustavo Alkmim
Master Student at Unicamp/Brazil
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