[fedora-arm] Linaro toolchains and Fedora

[Michael Hope]

On Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 9:48 AM, Jon Masters <jcm at redhat.com> wrote:
> Hi Michael,
>
> I hope you are doing well. It was good to see you again recently :)
>
> We would like to increase the relationship between Fedora ARM and
> Linaro. Although we do not plan to ship the Linaro toolchain as our
> primary on-target, etc. I do believe there would be a lot of value in
> getting your work available as a simple yum repo or RPM that can be
> installed on both an x86_64 Fedora host as a cross-compiler, or on the
> target. A simple prefix can distinguish these as Linaro tools.
>
> Can you let me/us know what you think would be required to see this
> happen? I hope we can brainstorm about this and other ways to better
> collaborate between our respective efforts.

Hi Jon.  I've cc'ed Marcin and Ricardo who are working on the Linaro
platform side.

We have a mix of pre-built cross and native compilers that ship with
Ubuntu or come in a PPA and it would be great to have something
similar for Fedora.

Currently we have a Linaro + Ubuntu sauce cross compiler, plain Linaro
cross compiler, and plain Linaro native compiler.  We're working on a
plain tarball cross compiler that runs on generic Linux or Windows as
well.

The Linaro + Ubuntu sauce cross compiler is in the Ubuntu archive from
at least Natty onwards and Marcin is working on making these available
in Debian.  The plain Linaro compilers are in a PPA, don't include the
Ubuntu specific patches, and are more up to date.

You probably want your default cross compiler to be the same as the
native compiler to reduce surprises so you'll probably want both a FSF
and Linaro cross compiler.

Regarding next steps, I'm afraid we don't have much Fedora packaging
knowledge in Linaro but are happy to help when you run into problems
and do any bug triage.  Any thoughts on where the scripts or binaries
would be hosted, or who would keep it up to date?

You might want Linaro GDB, QEMU, and the work that's going on into
libjpeg-turbo as well.  We do the changes in Ubuntu to demonstrate the
improvements, but I wonder if there's a way of sharing the whats and
whys so other distros can consider making the same changes.

-- Michael