+++ Dechesne, Nicolas [2010-08-23 23:31 +0200]:
Hello,
I have another question related to cross compilation...
I am still trying to setup a functional cross compilation environment for our packages. I want to be able to build without xdeb, using debuild command (this is mainly because we use other tools such as git-buildpackage).
This should work fine if you pass -aarmel
If you want to do the same thing in a controlled environment you can now also use pdebuild. I got this working last week. pdebuild-cross is just some hook scripts for pbuilder/pdebuild (and a multistrap config so it's trivial to make a cross-build chroot with base system+marcin's cross tools, but it doesn't actually matter how you get that environment created).
So that's building in a chroot rather than directly on your system, which has the advantage that your system doesn't fill up with piles of cross-packages (which tends to cause breakage eventually when the original native packages get updated), and ensures that the build is not relying on unspecified stuff which just happens to be installed. But it's slower because pbuilder unpacks chroot and installs stuff each time. If building the same thing often then updating the chroot image to have the necessary deps is a good idea.
You use it exactly the same way as pbuilder by changing into the source tree and doing 'pdebuild-cross'.
Get in touch if you are interested in using it because pdebuild-cross isn't yet in maverick and you need an updated multistrap for it to be painless.
When I build a package which has dependency on another .so file, my ./configure script fails, pkg-config complains that it cannot find my package config file (which is available in /usr/arm-linux-gnueabi/lib/pkgconfig.
Was that ./configure called with the right --build and --host options? It should find the pkgconfig files if so. Otherwise I'd say it was buggy.
If I set PKG_CONFIG_LIBDIR to /usr/arm-linux-gnueabi/lib/pkgconfig, then my build is fine, e.g. debuild -ePKG_CONFIG_LIBDIR=/usr/arm-linux-gnueabi/lib/ pkgconfig -b -aarmel -us -uc.
Is that expected?
It is generally the responsibility of the build-system config tool to set PKG_CONFIG_LIBDIR correctly - i.e autofoo or cmake or whatever.
That's a problem with packages which don't use such a system, but do use pkgconfig. I haven't seen many of those but there probably are some and they need that env var setting somehow when cross-building. In fact that path ought to be /usr/arm-linux-gnueabi/lib/pkgconfig: /usr/arm-linux-gnueabi/share/pkgconfig/ as there are some packages which install arch-independent PKGCONFIG files (eg pthreads).
I'm not sure if there are things that would break if an external build tools sets this. I can't think of any offhand, however it is currently the case that we rely on the rules files to correctly set the build environment when called in cross-build form. I'm inclined to leave that responsibility there, but I'm open to arguments that it should be done elsewhere.
I would appreciate any feedback on this.
What packages are you building? I'd like to be able to reproduce your issues.
Wookey