Hi, Let me give a status update on how well cross building works in unstable.
Toolchain --------- We have cross compilers and crossbuild-essential-* packages in unstable for quite a while now. (Thanks to Matthias Klose.) These tend to work well. Recently, sbuild saw significant improvements wrt. cross building such that now one can simply "sbuild --build=arch1 --host=arch2 ..." and have a reasonable expectation that it works. (Thanks to Johannes Schauer.) Also pkg-config now ships the symlinks to a working cross wrapper. (Thanks to Tollef Fog Heen.) Many more things have happened and the gist is that much of the toolchain just works now! :) Cross building the Debian archive --------------------------------- Debian unstable has about 22000 source packages. Out of those, about 5000 source packages can satisfy their Build-Depends in a cross build setting. For failing packages, detailed diagnostics can be found at http://bootstrap.debian.net/cross_all.html. (Thanks to Johannes Schauer.) Out of those 5000 source packages, I selected 3000 popular (as in popcon) source packages and built them using debomatic (build arch = amd64, host arch = ppc64el). (Thanks to Luca Falavigna.) About 1000 builds were successful (which doesn't imply that the resulting packages actually work.) We can conclude that about 4% of Debian can be cross built today. You can find the build logs at: http://subdivi.de/~helmut/debomatic-logs/ Processing the logs ------------------- I've hacked up a script that guesses failure reasons by scanning the logs with some regular expressions. Common issues are: * (>800) Using the build architecture compiler or linker. * (>150) Bug #812136 in dh_auto_build for cmake * (>130) configure fails due to missing values in config.site Bug reports ----------- I would appreciate help with inspecting these build logs. To avoid duplicating work, I added a bug column to the log index and intend to update it when given a notice. Given the number of build failures, I believe that a mass bug filing would be counterproductive and ask that bugs reports are only filed when accompanied with a patch or a detailed analysis. Please follow up to debian-cr...@lists.debian.org or stop by at #debian-bootstrap on irc.oftc.net if you have any questions regarding this effort. Helmut
