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

[Andreas Jochens]

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.

> 
> > The other direction, i.e. a 32-bit biarch lib32z1 on the native 64-bit 
> > port, is less difficult because all 64-bit ppc64 machines can also
> > run 32 bit binaries. That part of my patch got applied so that the 
> > ppc64 now has the lib32z1 biarch package.
> 
> Oh well, if the package needs to run the binary in place for building, this is
> i believe a breakage in such packages and needs to be fixed.
> 
> > The biarch approach generally requires that all biarch packages 
> > have to be built on 64-bit machines because the build process
> > is not clean with respect to cross-compilation for many packages.
> 
> Nonsense, the packages are just broken.

Please be careful calling something 'Nonsense'.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

Regards
Andreas Jochens