crosstool and .rpm's (was: [distcc] Bootable distcc node)

[Dan Kegel]

In http://lists.samba.org/archive/distcc/2004q1/002167.html, Dag Wieers wrote:
>>By the way, since there are so many combinations of processor, gcc version,
>>and glibc version, it would be hard to build all the RPMs for those
>>combinations.  ...
> 
> True. But there's no need to compile all combinations and RPM may help in 
> building for different architectures too. ...
> 
>>If you're supporting a stable of engineers working on the same
>>project, it's worth building the combinations you need once
>>(possibly as an RPM, if that's how your site likes things).
>>
>>But Fedora probably wouldn't want to include all the possible
>>RPMs my script can spit out.
>>This is a case where package managers have a bit of
>>a disadvantage compared to an engineer downloading the build script
>>from http://kegel.com/crosstool and just building the damn thing themselves.
> 
> I respectfully disagree. I see what you mean, but even Source 
> RPM packages are very handy to build for different targets with different 
> options from a single source. So even when I wouldn't have the combination 
> some engineer need, I guess if crafted good, a single SRPM would suffice.
> 
> So when I find the time I'm going to look into your tool and see how I can 
> take advantage of it as I've been always interested in providing this.

OK, I'm finally adding RPM support to crosstool.  I'm starting
with the spec file contributed by Charlie Brady,
http://kegel.com/crosstool/current/contrib/crosstool-mipsel.spec
and am parameterizing it; all.sh will fill in e.g. the
version numbers for the tools in use.
I'm probably going to stop short of generating .srpm's; generating
working .rpm's is enough for me for the moment (so the .spec
files I generate will be completely bogus except for the
%files section and whatever is needed to get that to work).

(I still don't know how to
make a single .SRPM for multiple targets, though.
"What Does RPM Do To Make Multi-Platform Packaging Easier" at
http://www.rpm.org/max-rpm/ch-rpm-multi.html talks about
rpm's multi-platform features; they might help for handling multiple
build systems, but provide no help for multiple targets.)

Anyone interested in helping test this (or fixing my
.spec files to be real)
please join the crossgcc mailing list and/or email me.
- Dan

-- 
My technical stuff: http://kegel.com
My politics: see http://www.misleader.org for examples of why I'm for regime change