Re: uclibc Debian

On Wed, Mar 19, 2003 at 12:14:27PM -0700, Erik Andersen wrote:
> On Wed Mar 19, 2003 at 06:35:01PM +0000, Justin Cormack wrote:
> > I remember that someone talked about making a uclibc based debian, but I
> > cant find the message in the archive. Has anyone started, and is anyone
> > still interested. Now there is the buildroot to bootstrap from it should
> > not be too hard, and once it is working it should save Erik from much
> > more work on the buildroot.
> > 
> > I would be glad to help / organise / do it starting in a few weeks once
> > I have finished some other stuff if there is interest.
> 
> That would be great.  FYI back in January I used the x86
> buildroot snapshot to build pretty much the whole Debian base
> system by hand.  As I recall, I only had to make a single trivial
> change to one package, everything else compiled up unmodified.
> At the time I had some trouble with tar misbehaving but hopefully
> that is fixed now.

I've done the same, but focussing more on cross-compiling packages.
That is, building i386-uclibc packages on an i386-glibc system,
and then running debootstrap with the i386-uclibc packages to
create a system.  In my case, there are (were) a number of problems,
some (most) of which have since been solved.  One remaining problem
is that there are no proper uclibc toolchain packages, just the
buggy uclibc-toolchain, which uses the extra/gcc-uClibc/ wrapper.

The dpkg-cross package plays a significant role in cross-building
packages, such as mangling build dependencies and setting the
environment appropriately to cross-build.  I recently hijacked
dpkg-cross and fixed a bunch of bugs.  However, I still need to
convince dpkg-cross to handle i386-uclibc correctly as a Debian
architecture.

I've also been working on cross-building packages for cygwin-i386,
which is fairly similar problem.



dave...