Michael Wolfson <michael@nosflow.com> writes:

> On Nov 20, 2004, at 10:24 AM, John Klos wrote:
> 
> > Very cool! pkgsrc-2004Q4 is supposed to be cut early in December, so
> > we'll probably end up using that (PowerPCs are quick enough, where
> > m68k, VAX, and other ports will have a lot of stuff from
> > pkgsrc-2004Q3 so they don't have to start from scratch). This is
> > good in the meanwhile.
> 
> "Quick" is relative, of course.  Shouldn't we be able to cross-compile
> packages for the popular, slow, architectures (such as m68k, arm, and
> mips)?  Actually my biggest problem was disk space.  Laptop drives
> don't come cheap, and we don't effectively support FireWire HDs.

Cross-compiling packages is something that is discussed every so often
(usually over on tech-pkg), but it's generally considered infeasable
because of the wide array of build systems used by packages. The build
system has to be aware of or at least friendly towards
cross-compiling, and most aren't.

For what it's worth, I believe the Debian project's
package-autobuilder does all of the builds on native platforms.

        - Nathan