RFC: Primary architecture promotion requirements

[Chris Tyler]

On Tue, 2012-03-20 at 17:37 +0100, drago01 wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 5:34 PM, Brendan Conoboy <blc at redhat.com> wrote:
> > On 03/20/2012 09:21 AM, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> >>
> >> That said, I considera cross-building environment for secondary arch to
> >> be inevitable, which would at least help for the class of issues, I am
> >> referring to above.
> >
> >
> > I'm a big fan of cross compilation, but introducing it into Fedora in order
> > to support ARM seems unlikely to succeed for too many reasons to go into.
> 
> The reasons are? ....

Fedora requires builds on the target system (either native or emulated,
but not crossed) because:
* some builds do tests, which will fail in cross
* some builds make a mini-${FOO} and then execute that to build the
final ${FOO}, which will fail in cross
* BuildRequires must sometimes be of the same arch as the target (e.g.,
libraries) and sometimes of the same arch as the builder (tools) --
there is no way at present to know which is which, so it's a requirement
that target arch == build arch

These can be overcome, but not without massive retooling.

-Chris