For your consideration: Secondary Architectures in Fedora

[Brendan Conoboy]

David Woodhouse wrote:
> On Fri, 2007-06-01 at 10:27 -0600, Brendan Conoboy wrote:
>> What do you mean by reliable?  Once a package is setup to work in a 
>> cross environment, it builds quite reliably.  
> 
> ...until the next time it gets broken by an uncaring upstream :)

In my experience, Fedora is the uncaring upstream which breaks things 
:-)  If cross compilation becomes a standard procedure on Fedora, such 
breakage is less common.  This is because a large number of the gotchas 
to cross compilation have to do with how the spec file works (especially 
%pre/%post), rather than the sources.  This is particularly true for 
packages that use auto*.  The question is how to introduce cross 
compilation without putting greater burden on the package maintainers.

> I just mean that I gave up on it, because I was seeing too many failures
> -- some of which didn't show up until you exercise some esoteric code
> path in the resulting binary. I wouldn't personally be happy to release
> cross-compiled stuff and call it 'Fedora'.

Awww, don't give up.  A lot of us love Fedora and love neat little 
devices.  We want to run Fedora on those devices.  We also run screaming 
at the idea of building *on* those devices.  Cross compilation is the 
answer.

-- 
Brendan Conoboy / Red Hat, Inc. / blc at redhat.com