Debian PowerPC e500v2 port, part 8

This is part of the Debian PowerPC e500 porting effort, the series on my blog starts at: "How to bootstrap a new Debian port"

Sorry that it's been so long since the last post... I was able to get my board booted from NFS, but after that things got complicated.

I spent quite a while trying to re-cross-bootstrap more packages; but GCC 4.6 refused to build in a reverse-cross configuration (IE: build a compiler on amd64 that runs on powerpcspe and targets powerpcspe).

Unfortunately, there's a bit of a nasty dependency loop that prevented me from doing a native build either.  In order to build a new GCC 4.6 with multiarch support, I needed to install a new multiarch libc6... except that multiarch libc6 "Breaks" my old GCC 4.4 (which doesn't have multiarch).

I ended up doing a native build of a new multiarch libc6 on my NFS-booted system and forcibly installing that (which leaves my GCC 4.4 broken).  Thankfully libc6 creates a file in "/etc/ld.so.conf.d/" that GCC uses to help find libraries and I could work around the runtime crt*.o objects like this:

  # cd /usr/lib
  # for i in powerpc-linux-gnuspe/*; do ln -s "$i"; done

With that I was able to build a new GCC 4.6.  Unfortunately, I still had an old gcc-defaults package (depending on gcc-4.4) and the new gcc-defaults package would not build unless I could install gcc-4.6 and gcj-jdk and a half-dozen other things I don't have.

Thankfully, with a couple more quick compatibility symlinks I could just remove "gcc" and "g++" and leave "build-essential" technically broken but have a working build environment:

  # cd /usr/bin
  # for i in *g{cc,++}-4.6; do ln -s "$i" "${i%-4.6}"; done

After that, I had a new libc6 installed, along with "multiarch-support"!  Finally!  Woohoo!!!

I upgraded dpkg, apt, aptitude, and about a half-dozen other libraries and tools that all need multiarch these days...

Now I need to figure out what I need to install/build/rebuild in order to make sbuild work again, then I should be able to get a new "buildd" server going.

And of course once I have one going I have enough spare hardware to start about 18 of them.

I'll hopefully post again later today with more progress.

Cheers,
Kyle Moffett