fedora for ARM

[Andy Green]

Hans de Goede wrote:
> Linus Walleij wrote:
>>
>> 2. As I understand it you employ the Fedora/x86 style of not using a
>>    cross-compiler to build these packages, but rather build them with ARM
>>    on ARM. I am aware of some RPM derivatives like those used by
>>    MontaVista, that employ a cross-compiler instead. What are your
>> thought
>>    on these issues? Have you tested both solutions and come to the
>>    conclusion that the all-ARM-enclosed build system is the way to go?
>>
> 
> In my somewhat limited experience cross-compiling of software which is
> not designed for that from day one is a big pain, let alone
> cross-compiling an entire distro! There are indeed some hacks around rpm
> to make the packahes think they are being build nativly, but what I've
> seen these are very gross hacks and still break often.
> 
> Native compiling definitively is the way to go, an alternative might be
> emulating the native system and building in the emulated system.

The way to go IMO is to improve the common packages to work well with
crosscompile... ones with recent autoblah on them generally work nice
and easily.  Fedora itself could do with say being able to build all the
arch binaries simply on a single build host too.

I have rpm-packaged a bunch of apps for crosscompile (arm9 and avr32) here

http://octotux.org

See

http://rpm.octotux.org

for the packages.  I don't claim the spec files meet any criteria of
beauty or utility for Fedora, since I was learning packaging from
scratch while I did them, but they do crosscompile.

Perl and Python are the holdouts I did not bother to spend more than a
day on, since they currently try to use their own target-compiled
binaries as part of their build process.

-Andy