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Date:      Thu, 21 Nov 2002 06:28:09 -0700 (MST)
From:      "M. Warner Losh" <imp@bsdimp.com>
To:        ru@FreeBSD.org
Cc:        current@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: Cross-Development with NetBSD
Message-ID:  <20021121.062809.64538355.imp@bsdimp.com>
In-Reply-To: <20021121102050.GC81999@sunbay.com>
References:  <20021121151714.U961-100000@squirm.dsto.defence.gov.au> <20021121.001014.56348240.imp@bsdimp.com> <20021121102050.GC81999@sunbay.com>

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In message: <20021121102050.GC81999@sunbay.com>
            Ruslan Ermilov <ru@FreeBSD.org> writes:
: On Thu, Nov 21, 2002 at 12:10:14AM -0700, M. Warner Losh wrote:
: > In message: <20021121151714.U961-100000@squirm.dsto.defence.gov.au>
: >             "Wilkinson,Alex" <Alex.Wilkinson@dsto.defence.gov.au> writes:
: > : Is FreeBSD likely to follow the in footsteps of NetBSD and create a framework to do crossbuilds ?
: > : 
: > : http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200211/xdevnetbsd.html
: > 
: > FreeBSD already has cross builds for a while, since before NetBSD's
: > cross build infrastructure.  However, NetBSD's infrastructure is a
: > little more extensive because it is possible to do incremental builds
: > and build full releases that work in a cross build evironment.
: > 
: What do you mean by "incremental builds and full releases that work ..."?

ruslan,

	First and foremost, I ment no disrespect in what I said.  You
have made the upgrade path for FreeBSD almost painless for a wide
range of releases (less painful than NetBSD has been at times for me).
You gave FreeBSD the ability to cross build world about a year or a
year and a half ahead of NetBSD's similarly integrated ability.

NetBSD builds a directory full of tools that you can later use to
incrementally build, say, 'ls' or 'cat' because one can define
USETOOLS to be 'yes' and have the make automatically pick them up when
rebuilding.  There are a few of the details I'm a little unclear on,
but that's the jist of it.

Second, the NetBSD have tested almost all of their platforms in a
cross build release scenario.  They know that the binaries that result
from 'make release' build on i386 actually boot on the target
platform.  They have build 1.6.x for many of their platforms this
way.  So far, the FreeBSD has done all its builds natively.

One of the cool things about the NetBSD approach, btw, is that they
have a src/tools directory.  This directory lists all the build tools
for building in one place.  I think that this is a little cleaner than
what we have in the Makefile.inc1 right now.  On the other hand, it is
a lot more complicated than what we have now, and I'm not sure that
added complexity is worth it.

Warner

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