[Discussion] Would Debian start building OS' with cross-compilers in mind?

[MattTheDouche]

Hello; I hadn't heard of ARMv8-A or cross-compilers until I had bought a Raspberry Pi -- no prizes as to how. I understand they take up limited space, but maybe small, economical computers should have lots of memory to make up for this. I'd really like to know what the community thinks of releasing Debian with cross-compilers as standard and with different demands of manufacturers.

[blackbird]

I'm not sure what you mean. I have a Raspberry Pi 4 running with official Debian. As far as I know the packages are built with Raspberry Pies since cross-building is not so easy for complex projects with many dependencies or for languages that don't have cross-compilers.
For simpler projects it shouldn't be so difficult to setup a cross building environment in Debian.

Here I found some slides about the current state - https://get.debian.org/pub/debian-meeti ... ilding.pdf
According to the slides about 50% of all packages could be cross-built.

[MattTheDouche]

I'm not sure what you mean. I have a Raspberry Pi 4 running with official Debian. As far as I know the packages are built with Raspberry Pies since cross-building is not so easy for complex projects with many dependencies or for languages that don't have cross-compilers.
For simpler projects it shouldn't be so difficult to setup a cross building environment in Debian.

Here I found some slides about the current state - https://get.debian.org/pub/debian-meeti ... ilding.pdf
According to the slides about 50% of all packages could be cross-built.

Thank you. I'm happy to hear that most Raspberry Pi owners don't have this problem. I bought a Pi 5 as a first computer and I found myself far out of my depth.

[blackbird]

Is your problem that you don't find an Debian image for Raspberry PI 5? When the Debian Wiki entry is still correct, this is not available since the mainline kernel still don't supports the device. Easiest for the Pi is always to use the official Linux for it, "Raspberry Pi OS". This is now based on Debian 12 but I don't know how much they changed.