[Debian-ppc64-devel] Re: ppc64 archive bloating alioth disk ...

[Sven Luther]

On Fri, Sep 23, 2005 at 02:01:59PM +0200, Andreas Jochens wrote:
> On 05-Sep-23 13:14, Sven Luther wrote:
> > On Fri, Sep 23, 2005 at 11:37:33AM +0200, Andreas Jochens wrote:
> > > You are right, the 'lib64z1' biarch binary package is currently only 
> > > available on sparc and s390. For powerpc the lib64z1 binary can apparently 
> > > be built only on a 64-bit machine with a 64-bit kernel, but not
> > > on an ordinary 32-bit powerpc machine. This seems to be the reason
> > > why 'lib64z1' was not enabled on powerpc. This is a general problem
> > > of the biarch approach - cross-compiling does not work generally.
> > 
> > Euh, this seems to me to be somewhat strange, i have no trouble building 64bit
> > kernels, so i really doubt tihs is the reason. Is it possible that it was not
> > possible to build it prior to the biarch toolchain being available ?
> 
> No, the '-m64' switch worked fine already. 
> 
> Please look at #323591 for the reasons why the biarch build fails
> on powerpc.

Ok.

> Please be careful calling something 'Nonsense'.

I was using a much stronger word in my first draft :)

> Many packages rely on the possiblity of executing binaries on the
> target architecture of the build.

And are thus broken, this will break in the presence of cross-compilation,
which is needed for some of the embedded arches, so the emdebian folk tell me.
But in any case, since we build both ppc32 and ppc64, if a binary needs to be
run, we can just run the ppc32 version if needed.

This is just plain inadapted and broken build system, 

> First of all, most test suites require this. It may be possible
> to switch the test suites off, but that alone will be a lot of work.
> And some test suites are used for a reason.

Well, this is indeed something. But then those are broken in the case of cross
compilation anyway.

> Secondly, there are all kinds of packages which rely on binaries
> which are produced during the build. For a particularly ugly example
> look at openoffice.org2. If you know a fix for this, please apply it.

Sure, broken packages can be fixed though.

> Additionally, the Debian build utilities also have problems with
> cross-building. One example is 'dh_shlibdeps' which does not work
> properly for non-native architectures. Do you have a solution for
> this other than using a 64 bit machine for compilation?

not yet, but i believe there is no reason why this should not be fixed. When i
first started on ppc64 stuff, neither glibc nor gcc could be build on ppc32,
and it does now.

> It would of course be nice to solve these problems, but it does not
> help to try to ignore them.

Bah, if things are broken, they get fixed, not worked around.

Friendly,

Sven Luther