On Feb 1, 2013, at 2:19 AM, Ingo Weinhold <ingo_weinhold@xxxxxx> wrote: > I'm not going to address your examples. None of them is what I would consider > an everyday use case (i.e. >99% of the work done on Haiku is not similar to > any of those). While it may not be 99% of the development time, neither is maintaining third-party packages, and being able to deploy modern compilers (clang), ABI changes (armv7), and simply evolve dependencies that cross packages, is valuable work that has a very broad reach. > Being able to automate as much as possible is certainly desirable. I doubt > that we will be able to build the whole OS from the scratch automatically > anytime soon, though. One major problem is that many software packages cannot > be cross-built by default (even something as fundamental as bash falls into > that category). Making/hacking them so that they can be cross-built is likely > quite a lot of one-time and continuous maintenance work. I think it is more > realistic that we get cross-building support going for the minimal set of > software packages required to do native builds. A fully automatic OS build > would then involve building most software in a VM. The thing I find frustrating is that this used to work. It was an intentional decision to move things out-of-tree before automation existed to maintain things out-of-tree, even if that maintenance is done with non-cross builds. I don't necessarily think supporting cross-development builds necessary makes for every 3rd party package (it IS an enormous amount of work), but I will say, it has made development of the core OS *so* much easier compared to my past experiences on similar work, and I've thought it was really awesome that Haiku supported (mostly) full cross-compilation. -landonf