Re: sparc packages?

[Valery Ushakov <uwe%stderr.spb.ru@localhost>]

On Fri, Mar 03, 2023 at 21:12:06 +0000, Chase Rayfield wrote:


> On Friday, March 3, 2023 at 03:26:50 PM EST, Cameron Kelly <cam.k801%gmail.com@localhost> wrote:
> > Out of curiosity, how are the pkgin binaries compiled? Are they
> > done so by volunteers?
>
> NetBSD typically cross compiles with bulk builds (its not like you
> can native compile for ancient arm handhelds or 68k etc... anyway).

AFAIK, cross-compiling packages in general is not possible, b/c the
packaged software itself does not support cross-compilation.  There
are some palliative measures like distcc, and compiling 32 bit
packages on a 64 bit descendant under compat32.  i386 builds are done
like that, as far as I know.  It can probably be used for sparc on
sparc64 as well.

The *base* system itself is of course fully cross-compilable.  Even
when you are building on the same machine, the build process will
build and use a cross compiler by default.

As for ancient handhelds... Some years ago, just for kicks, I did run
build.sh on Jornada 690.  It took... a while, but completed
sucessfully (after first revealing a few interesing bugs, like a
sequence point bug in lint).  But gcc is getting bigger and more
memory hungry every year...

-uwe