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by lmm 1056 days ago
Well-written applications will just work. Badly-written applications may require patches or be impractical to build at all, and some system software may not make sense on the architecture at all.

There's a whole lot of build infrastructure for Debian; by default the package maintainer doesn't need to do anything specific, building for all architectures will happen by default.
2 comments
hampereddustbin 1055 days ago
I wouldn't go as far as telling something is badly written just because it's written to work on one platform. It can be an exceptional application even when it only works using a single platforms' intrinsics. Similarly a badly written application may work on many platforms
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totetsu 1055 days ago
What kind of assumptions would badly-written applications make to make themselves impractical to cross-build?
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bregma 1055 days ago
Othar than word size (eg. i386 vs. x86_64), endianness (eg. PPC vs. x86), alignment (eg. ARM vs. x86) there's plenty of other low-level issues like parameter passing conventions, call frame handling, exception handling, presence or absence of optional instructions or registers, and a number of other subtle gotchas that could affect a port. Instruction probing is one of the ones we run into where everything builds find and fails at runtime.

If you're working at a high enough level you're probably fine. Like the difference between being an auto mechanic and using the app to hail a ride.

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smallpipe 1055 days ago
You're missing the biggest one, concurrency model.
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capitol_ 1055 days ago
In my packaging work I encounter hard coded assumptions about pointer width, endianness and presence of atomic operations.
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sanxiyn 1055 days ago
All Debian packages are built natively. There is no cross build going on here.
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pabs3 1055 days ago
During the initial port bootstrap process, the initial package set is cross-built using rebootstrap:

https://wiki.debian.org/PortsDocs/New#Bootstrap

Perhaps in the future Debian will be able to have cross-build-only architectures, that have hardware too slow to build software.

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ilyt 1055 days ago
Assembler optimizations without fallback to pure C for other architectures for example.
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