Fedora and Cross Compiling

[Brendan Conoboy]

David Woodhouse wrote:
> Before we get to actually cross-compiling something for release, it
> would be good to get cross-compilers into Fedora.
> 
> Making a cross-binutils package isn't hard; it's a relatively
> modification to our existing binutils package to make it build for
> multiple %targets.
> 
> Making a cross-gcc package which targets linux-elf is harder, because of
> the evil recursive dependencies to which you refer above. It would be
> good if we could get that working though.

Hi,

Yep, we've been through this a few times.  Having discussed this with 
you a number of times before, I know where you're coming from.  We 
really should be able to build gcc without having to build parts of 
glibc in the process.  That said, this is really only an exercise in 
bootstrapping which doesn't happen very often.

Let us, for example, pretend we're just discussing cross compilation for 
existing archs.  Because of the iterative nature of these builds, 
everything we need is already there to build the cross compiler.  We 
have kernel headers and we have a glibc rpm for the target arch.  All 
that we need in some machinery to pull in files from a different arch 
and extract them into a sys-root.

As gcc matures, it's likely that the libgcc problem will go away by it 
being split out.  At that time, the chicken/egg problem will be solved 
without having to resort to clever hacks.

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