[Arm-netbook] 2.7.4 preproduction sample, 1.7 MD, Questions

[Paul Boddie]

On Sunday, 19 July 2020 17:32:41 CEST Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
> On Sunday, July 19, 2020, Hendrik Boom <hendrik at topoi.pooq.com> wrote:
> > 
> > debian does have an archive site somewhere where they keep totally
> > obsolete and discontinued distributions.
> 
> http://archive.debian.org is supposed to be that location.
> 
> however the pool directory does not contain gcc cross compilers.

Cross-compilers are relatively new in Debian as broadly supported things 
(ignoring things like Atmel cross-compilers and one-off attempts at providing 
toolchains for some release architectures). I think that they first made it 
into the distribution properly for Stretch, meaning that we're only on the 
second release that has them.

Also, older packages probably have all sorts of dependencies on older 
distribution versions, and with that there's the need to virtualise or chroot 
entire software distributions. And then, it might turn out that the precise 
configuration of the compilers isn't entirely suitable, as I have discovered 
for various SoCs in the past [*].

Paul

[*] However, that was actually related to soft-float support for MIPS, which 
needs to be configured at build-time for GCC, but which was omitted from the 
Debian toolchains because the assumption is that all the code compiled by the 
Debian compiler will be deployed on Linux, and Linux has run-time support for 
floating point instruction emulation (that a bare metal or alternative 
environment might not have). But in general, you cannot be too careful with 
some of this stuff, and not all shortcuts turn out to be what they seemed to 
be.