Cross-compilers.

[Erwin Rol]

On Wed, 2006-08-02 at 15:21 -0500, Clark Williams wrote:
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> - From the responses you got, I'd say there's a fair amount of interest.
> 
> What do you think about starting small (e.g. generating a mesh of FC x
> FC compilers)? Starting with an FC target would mean that we could use
> packages we know already work in the Fedora framework. It would just
> be a matter of making a specfile (or series of specfiles) that are
> cross-friendly to build and package gcc, binutils, glibc and gdb.
> I've done that a few times and while it's not exactly pretty, it's
> doable. We could generate x86, x86_64, and PPC hosted toolchains for
> x86, x86_64 and PPC and then be able to build say PPC packages from an
> x86_64 (the immediate benefactor would probably be the build system).
> Of course after getting the toolchains packaged, it's a matter of
> asking the maintainers to keep their specfiles cross friendly, but if
> they'll take patches, we can clean that up.

It is way more than just keeping their specfiles cross friendly. Most
larger projects, like Xorg, are a bitch to crosscompile, and almost all
need a lot of tuning before even './configure' works. The ones without
configure will probably even more work to get obscure Makefiles to do
cross compiling. 

The cross compiler part is less than 0.1% of the problem.

- Erwin