Re: Thoughts about bringing back old bulk build system

[Taylor R Campbell <campbell+netbsd-tech-pkg%mumble.net@localhost>]

   Date: Fri, 07 Aug 2015 15:00:50 -0400
   From: Greg Troxel <gdt%ir.bbn.com@localhost>

   Agreed.  While natively working would be nice, running the pbulk master
   on a big-memory box and using the native ones to acutally do builds
   sounds good.  Then one could distcc to cross-compile, and eventually
   make more of pkgsrc crossbuildable.

The main barrier to bulk cross-builds is simply that pbulk doesn't
understand the distinction between cross- and native-builds, nor
between BUILD_DEPENDS and TOOL_DEPENDS.

I would be happy to help a volunteer out with teaching pbulk about
these things -- I just don't have time for it myself.  If you're
interested, see my AsiaBSDcon 2015 talk on the subject for some
background:

https://2015.asiabsdcon.org/timetable.html.en#P7C
https://www.netbsd.org/gallery/presentations/riastradh/asiabsdcon2015/pkgsrc-cross-paper.pdf
https://www.netbsd.org/gallery/presentations/riastradh/asiabsdcon2015/pkgsrc-cross.pdf [slides]

The secondary barrier is the highly-depended packages such as Perl and
Python that don't cross-build currently.  Short of fixing them to
cross-build properly, one could invent a mechanism (or just do it
manually) to build them natively, perhaps using distcc, and copy the
binary packages to the cross-building host.