[Fedora-packaging] Namespace for cross-compilation tools?

[Michael J. Knox]

Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-06-15 at 23:19 -0500, Jason L Tibbitts III wrote:
>>>>>>> "RC" == Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de> writes:
>> RC> Why?
>>
>> What is "i386" and why does it have a subpackage of "rtems4.7"?
>>
>> RC> This name is the name being used for GNU crosstool toolchains for
>> RC> many years (> a decade). It corresponds to the target
>> RC> canonicalization tuple internally being used by binutils/gcc/gdb,
>> RC> and the autotools.
>>
>> So?
> Yes. Target canonicalization tuples are standardized (In particular in
> binutils, GCC and gdb) and shared between *all* projects using
> config.guess and config.sub (I.e. all package using the autotools).
> 
>>   We are free to make decisions for ourselves instead of blindly
>> using someone else's naming convention.
> Yes, it's our freedom to waste time on re- and over engineering parts
> others have spend decades on.
> 
> A gcc cross compiler's components are called 
> <target>-<component>
> 
> You can even find traces of this in Fedora:
> e.g.
> /usr/bin/i386-redhat-linux-gcc
> /usr/bin/i386-redhat-linux-c++
> 
> I.e. people will be looking for <target>-<tool>
> 
>>   If the name is completely
>> confusing (as it is to me) then surely we should talk about it before
>> just stuffing it into the repository.
> Would packages be called 
> i386-cygwin-gcc
> or
> i386-redhat-gcc
> i586-suse-gcc
> sparc-sun-solaris2.8-gcc
> 
> be confusing to you?
> 
> IMO, they are self-explanatory.

Why is the binary target name being used for the package name? That's 
not intuitive to an end user at all IMHO.

I think confusing the binary target name with the actual package name is 
a mistake.

gcc is gcc, not i386-redhat-linux-gcc

OpenSUSE uses cross-<arch>-gcc/binutils/whatever-version
debian looks like it uses gcc/binutils/whatever-<arch>-version

Personally I like the cross-prefix, its a lot more obvious to an end 
user what the package is and is for, but thats just me.

Michael