Cross-compilers.

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Mon, 2006-07-24 at 15:17 -0400, John W. Linville wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 23, 2006 at 08:15:18AM -0400, David Woodhouse wrote:
> 
> > Does anyone else care? Other than the full set of rawhide architectures,
> > what others would we include? Alpha, SPARC{64,}, ARM, MIPS, SH I assume?
> > Would anyone volunteer to maintain each of those toolchains? I wouldn't
> > really feel happy doing it myself, since when it comes to GCC I would
> > only ever be a package-monkey, and not a proper _maintainer_.
> 
> I think it would be great that have this, for a wide range of arches.

/me thinks there is a common misunderstanding.

A cross-toolchain doesn't target an "arch" - it targets a
"target-system".

Such a "target-system" typically consists of an architecture, a libc and
and parts of the OS/kernel (sometimes plus further target run-time
libraries). 

E.g. an i386-linux -> mips-linux cross toolchain is a completely
different toolchain than a i386-pc-linux -> mips-<some-embedded-target>
toolchain.

I.e. building a cross-toolchain basically condenses to building and
packaging the works the target system maintainers do, and not to develop
on the target system (or target arch).

> As for maintainance, I'm in the same situation as you.  But, if you
> can get things rolling I'd be happy to help maintain MIPS and/or
> maybe some others.
As I tried to express above, arch-specific development is an almost
negligible part in building cross-toolchains. 
The focus is on system-integration.

Ralf