Now that we finally have some cross-compilers in the main archive we need to sort out pkg-config so that something provides <triplet>-pkgconfig commands.
This patch does that in a very neat way which means that things build-depending on pkg-config will get the right version installed whether cross-building or not. You expressed a lack of enthusiasm for this design at debconf, but have not replied to the bug, or come up with anything better that we are aware of. We have tested this patch quite thoroughly and it works nicely. Things which build-depend on pkg-config and call pkg-config natively or <triplet>-pkg-config when crossing get the right packages installed and just work. Nothing special is needed in the environment and no changes to any packages apart from this one to pkg-config are needed for both native and cross-building, and build-dependencies, both native and cross, to work correctly. Time is now extremely short for geting this into jessie, so this is good time to make a decision. Do you wish to veto an NMU now with this change in, or may I go ahead? Without fixing this correctly here, the only way to have crossbuilding work without manual intervention (and thus the only way to make it work at all inside tools like sbuild, for pkg-config-using packages) is to make pkg-config build-essential for crossbuilding (which is wrong, it isn't) by creating <triplet>-pkg-config packages containing symlinks which are always installed by a meta-package (crossbuild-essential-arch). This does work, but involves creating another set of single-symlink packages, one per architecture, and having an incorect build-essential addition (when crossing) rather than just letting build-dependencies work as they should. As you can tell, we really do much prefer this solution. Do you have any significant technical objections to uploading this? I have built sample packages of pkg-config 0.28-1.1 for amd64, armel, and armhf which use the patch as in this bugrep, and uploaded them to this repo: https://people.debian.org/~wookey/tools/debian That is what would be uploaded. Sorry about the enormous shortness of time. Until it looked like the crosstoolchains were actually going to make it into jessie this was not a pressing issue. As I'm sure you are aware an upload needs to happen very soon indeed to get through new and propogate into testing. Whilst this problem can be worked around with external repos or manual fiddling, it would be very nice if we could just have this working slickly in jessie. Bootstrapping would work, and quite a lot of packages in the archive would be crossable. I don't want to upload this against your will: that would be pointless, so I hope the above persuades you that this is the sensible way to go? thoughts? cc:ed in case this otherwise gets lost in pile of other BTS mail. Hope that's not annoying. Wookey -- Principal hats: Linaro, Emdebian, Wookware, Balloonboard, ARM http://wookware.org/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
