Re: Building Linux packages on NetBSD

[Jonathan Perkin <jperkin%joyent.com@localhost>]

* On 2020-06-22 at 11:10 BST, Mayuresh wrote:

> If I want to utilize a NetBSD host to build pkgsrc packages for a Linux
> installation, what are my options?
> 
> 1. I can possibly use qemu + a light weight Linux distro to create the
> required setup. Is that something feasible? (It would be slow, but any
> other issues?)

It wouldn't necessarily be slow - does NetBSD support KVM?  The hosts
I use to build the Linux packages that I distribute:

  https://pkgsrc.joyent.com/install-on-linux/

are built using CentOS 6.x and 7.x VMs running qemu/kvm on SmartOS,
and they're able to complete full bulk builds in under 24 hours.

> 2. How to ensure the library compatibility for the base libraries. For
> example I might use some very light weight distro (possibly tiny core) for
> compilation purpose, but my deployment host may be running a different
> distro. Is it possible that I copy the libraries from the target machine
> to a certain (non standard) location on my compilation host and have
> pkgsrc link against them (instead of the compilation host's libraries?)

Generally this doesn't work because Linux distributions do not follow
any compatibility guidelines, so glibc and even basic commands are
kept under different directories depending on the distribution.

You can try to minimise this by building everything with
PREFER_PKGSRC, but ultimately you're going to run into problems so I
wouldn't bother.

-- 
Jonathan Perkin  -  Joyent, Inc.  -  www.joyent.com