Fedora Board Recap 2008-JUL-15

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Fri, 2008-07-18 at 08:13 -0400, Tom "spot" Callaway wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-07-18 at 06:50 +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> > I feel a lot of people don't want to comprehend that cross-toolchains
> > are ordinary (Fedora-)native applications and do not need any special
> > treatment besides the spots where they collide with current policies.
> 
> The cross-toolchain (mingw-gcc, mingw-binutils) are ordinary enough.
> What is concerning is that:
> 
> 1. Even though there is a practical standard for cross-compilers, no one
> has yet written it down.
Which standard do you need?

There is only one point where GNU-cross-toolchains collide with our
current guidelines:

${exec_prefix}/<target-alias> is defacto practice in GNU-toolchains for
a long time (decades), but collides with the FHS. Unfortunately,
changing this would require a non-trivial amount of work.


Technically, there are many issues related to rpm and redhat-rpm-config,
mostly related to them lacking generality (e.g. not taking into account
foreign binary formats/debug-info generation not being able to
distinguish between target and host sources).


> 2. Some of the folks in the conversation (the libvirt folks) want to
> build other (non-toolchain) packages with the mingw cross-toolchain.
Well, building foreign binaries is the purpose of using a
cross-toolchain ;) That said, wrt. MinGW, which to allow and which not
is a political issue. I would lean to not to shipping any but some
"hello world" or "FreeDOS"-class testcases.

However, even this isn't a new topic: We already have several
cross-toolchains (off-head, IIRC, the only GNU cross-toolchain is the
avr cross-toolchain, but there already are others) and several emulators
in Fedora.

Ralf