[Fedora-packaging] Re: supporting closed source operating systems?

[Jeff Spaleta]

On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 9:55 AM, Richard W.M. Jones <rjones at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 09:54:06AM -0800, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
>> All the more reason to move ALL mingw compiled dlls into a separate
>> repo tree. If its got libraries and applications.. its almost a
>> completely separate distribution in and of itself.
>
> I think I don't understand what you mean by a separate Fedora
> repository.  Do you mean as in the way that 'sources', 'debuginfo' and
> 'updates' are separate?  How would I go about requesting such a repo?

We don't know yet...cross compiling is new. So we need to figure out
how best to support it.

> You mentioned the similarity to secondary archs in your other email.
> Obviously this does sort of look like a secondary arch, but I think
> there are significant differences -- eg. this work isn't self-hosting,
> unless you involve an actual Windows host (or perhaps some really
> complicated Wine configuration??)

Right its not completely self-hosting. Everything about
cross-compiling is wonky. Its mixes things up.  But basically..for the
purposes of my strawman.  we'd set up a virtual arch in our build
system, but when building in our build system for it pulls from the
i386 tree as its build environment.  Someone needs to tell me if this
is possible to do through nested arch definitions.

So for the sake of argument, can we teach rpm to understand an arch
called "mingw-ix86"
such that it inherits the ix86 packages? We then construct a build
environment definition in mock which includes the mingw-ix86 and ix86
branches that will run on ix86 hardware and compile the mingw dll
subpackages which are ifarch conditioned?

I would need a more technical person to tell me how bad my strawman
is.  And yes I realize, its going to take some amount of technical
work to do. And yes..I know I'm not the one who is going to be doing
it. But I think we need to get this right and make a space for this
sort of cross-compiled content in a way that lets it grow organically.
 I just don't think we can do that if we shove these payloads into the
main tree.

-jef