Restricting architectures

[Loïc Minier]

On Thu, Sep 02, 2010, Jon Smirl wrote:
> As an embedded developer I'd like to see a standardized tool chain for
> building on most ARM architectures. There are at least two groups of
> users for this tool chain - ARM based PCs and embedded systems. There
> are dozens are various tool chain build systems for ARM. Every time I
> get a new embedded dev board I have to build yet another ARM tool
> chain to match what the accompanying software expects. This is a
> significant hurdle to new developers who may not have fast machines.
> Some of the people I've worked with needed 24hrs to build a tool
> chain. Let's get a standardized tool chain for the older ARM chips
> into a distribution to stop this needless proliferation.

 I'd like to understand your use cases to make sure we're on track to
 cover them.  First, we're trying to maintain a toolchain source tree
 which is adequately patched; that's mostly launchpad.net/gcc-linaro
 right now.  Second, we're integrating that into the native Ubuntu
 toolchain.  Third, we're providing a cross-toolchain to install in
 Ubuntu environments.  The latter two are built from the same source,
 which includes the gcc-linaro tree.

 Is this what you're looking for, or do you need more?  What were the
 specific cases which you experienced which required different
 toolchain?

 Things I can think of, but I don't know how important they are:
 - being able to easily change the default toolchain build flags (how do
   you get the toolchain?  which flags do you use?)
 - being able to easily drop patches into the toolchain (how do you get
   the toolchain?  which kind of patches?)
 - being able to roll your own toolchain packages from another toolchain
   tree
 - providing RPM packages for native and cross toolchains
 - providing tarball "packages" with "standalone" linux binaries,
   similar to CS toolchain downloads

 I think we have partial answers for some of the above things, but many
 we dismissed.  Would love to hear which one you think are important for
 your specific use case (tell us what you do!)

-- 
Loïc Minier