Make the base system cross-buildable

It is very useful to be able to cross-build packages in Debian for many reasons, especially around faster dev times on slow architectures, and new ports. Making the whole archive crossbuildable is a huge goal, but making the bottom 140 or so packages needed for a port bootstrap cross-buildable is a reasonable goal. This work has already been done in Ubuntu (Raring) and should be upstreamed into Debian.

This goal is (somewhat) dependent on the ?CrossToolchains in the Archive goal. (It can still be done with external toolchains if need be, but it makes much more sense to have everything necessary maintained in the archive).


This needs:

optional extras

A cross-buildd running to check cross-buildability of packages should be set up so that maintainers get timely info on breakages, otherwise builds are quite likely to be broken when you want to use them. Like this one:


In principle (and practice) this goal is architecture independent, but in practice the scope can be limited to amd64->arm(hf/el) building if it helps as that is where most current interest lies.

The package set needs to be checked but should be very close to:



Mailing list: