On Friday 7. December 2018 16.28.24 Wookey wrote:
On 2018-12-07 15:24 +0100, Paul Boddie wrote:
Cross-building would be a workaround, but Debian appears fundamentally opposed to that,
Do you mean 'as buildds'?
I don't know. If that is the way the Debian archive is built then perhaps the answer is "yes".
Debian's support from cross-building has improved hugely over the last 8 years, and you can now crossbuild a _lot_ of debian. Helmut told me 'nearly 2/3rds' a while ago, although I'm not sure if that's 2/3rds of _everything_, or some subset.
It is certainly easier to perform cross-building activities, although I will admit that I am not typically cross-building packages these days. I've probably said before that when the cross-toolchains became available, it helped a great deal with the things I tend to do, so I really appreciate them.
One thing that I do find frustrating, however, is the trail of pages on various sites (wikis, typically) that describe the state of progress at different points in time. It isn't particularly coherent and undermines the impression of the progress that has been made.
There is lots more that could be done (not least educating upstreams that like to do 'uncrossable things'), but we are the opposite of 'fundamentally opposed to it'.
Perhaps I should have clarified that Debian appears fundamentally opposed to using cross-building as the means of building the archive for an architecture. I understand that the aim is to ensure that people can run systems that are able to build their own packages, but it seems that we will arrive at a point where the imperfect result of natively-built packages needing to be complemented by cross-built packages will become unavoidable.
even though the alternative is the abandonment of architectures. And you even have the new and shiny arm64 support in jeopardy because the appropriate server hardware never seems to get to market (or stick around).
In what way is arm64 'in jeopardy'? I don't think it's going anywhere.
Maybe I got the wrong impression from this message:
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/linux.debian.devel.release/meYaIZR7Sm0/GtHUx...
I guess that the main concerns are that some arm64 products aren't supporting arm32 (of whichever flavour), that there are lots of "development board" products but not so many "data centre" products, making automation and management difficult. I might also add that when looking at ARM server offerings, they seem to be pretty expensive (maybe to differentiate themselves from existing offerings on traditional server architectures), and it probably doesn't help that companies don't follow through on their roadmaps, meaning that people end up waiting forever for something that might have been a usable product.
But maybe there is no shortage of usable arm64 hardware for archive-building purposes and that my perceptions of such shortages for other architectures are also incorrect, too. If so, I stand corrected.
Paul