Hi Wookey,
On Thu, Sep 02, 2010 at 10:21:24PM +0100, Wookey wrote:
I've been trying to tell embedded engineers not to build a new toolchain for every single project for some years now, but I've met a fair amount of resistance to the idea.
Wearing my embedded linux developer hat, I really like your idea. We use Debian all over the place, and if it contains solid cross toolchains for the ARM/PowerPC/SH/Blackfin/x86 targets we are working with I'm really happy with the idea that we wouldn't have to work on toolchains any more. It is a pain every time you have to do it, it sucks up a lot of time and the result is almost never something which can impress your customers.
However, we (mainly the group at Pengutronix that develops ptxdist) still work on OSELAS.Toolchain simply because the customers we work with do not all use Debian or Ubuntu but also SuSE and RedHat/Fedora. So in order to provide stable and reproducable board support packages, having toolchains that are independend of the distribution are quite important. The toolchains built from OSELAS.Toolchain install into the
/opt/OSELAS.Toolchain-<version>
hierarchy and are independend of the rest of the system. On the other hand, the toolchain is an "external" component for ptxdist, so if Debian and Ubuntu continue their world domination efforts, it may simply happen that over the time the other distros become less important and we can tell the customers to either use Debian/Ubuntu or be on their own.
I would like to test what the Debian guys have available. Can you point me to the right entry point? There seem to be too much Debian cross efforts out there and it is dificult for people from the outside to find the right things. All I find in my apt-cache is this:
thebe:~# apt-cache policy gcc-4.3-arm-linux-gnu gcc-4.3-arm-linux-gnu: Installed: (none) Candidate: 4.3.2-1.1 Version table: 4.3.2-1.1 0 500 http://www.emdebian.org lenny/main Packages
This is
a) not in debian (not even in unstable) b) gcc-4.3.2 + binutils-2.18.1 + glibc-2.7.
The gcc upstream development (this is where you have to push your patches into and where it makes sense to do development on toolchains) is gcc-4.6, and for production systems I'd like to have gcc-4.5.1, binutils-2.20.1 and glibc-2.12.1. So I assume I have not the right paths in my sources.list?
rsc