Bug#633884: perl cross-build support

[Dominic Hargreaves]

On Thu, Jul 14, 2011 at 06:48:54PM +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> I'm currently working on cross-building bits of Debian and I've got to
> perl. The main issues are setting up the configuration for the built,
> but the perl also uses miniperl etc. during the build and installation
> phase. This is difficult in a cross-build. :-)
> 
> Also: for later support of cross-building of perl modules they will
> need to pick up the right configuration to use themselves. I've got
> patches coming for a few modules, starting with liblocale-gettext-perl
> as an example. I've got that building using this setup now.
> 
> Debdiff attached; the patch is large, but hopefully easy to
> follow. The changes are in 4 sections:
> 
> 1. Minor tweaks to debian/rules etc. for package build time.
> 2. Generic patch for cross-building perl
> 3. Addition of cross config for armel
> 4. Addition of cross config for armhf
> 
> The bulk of the diff is in (3) and (4). I've tried to minimise the
> effects on the rest of the package to make the changes as palatable as
> possible - please let me know if I can do anything more to help here!

Hi Steve,

Thanks for forwarding the patch set for this. In fact, it seems there
was a similar effort made back in #285559 which never received much
attention.

There are a couple of reasons I suspect we won't want to apply this
just at the moment. Firstly, we're fairly close to migrating to perl 5.14
(currently being staged in experimental) so we'd probably want to
target such a large set of patches there rather than the current 5.12.

Even then, however, we much prefer to apply patches which have at least
been submitted upstream and had a chance for comment. Has there been
any attempt to do this?

I'm not familiar with the current perl cross-build infrastructure, or
indeed its history, so any additional commentary in that area would
probably be welcome.

Likewise, any commentary about how the arch-specific config files were
produced and/or modified would be useful (presuambly there is a reason
they aren't generated during the package build process).

Cheers,
Dominic.

-- 
Dominic Hargreaves | http://www.larted.org.uk/~dom/
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