Bug#980963: dpkg: Please add ARC architecture

[Helmut Grohne]

Hi Alexey,

On Wed, Mar 03, 2021 at 07:35:39PM +0000, Alexey Brodkin wrote:
> Well not sure why there's a dependency on glibc as w/o ARC target support
> in dpkg nothing could be built for ARC. For example I did built Binutils
> with fixed dpkg.

There is no hard dependency in that direction. Just pushback on adding
lots of Debian architectures that never really take off. For instance,
or1k was never fully bootstrapped. It'll be merged. Just not now. (Not
speaking as a dpkg maintainer here, just telling what will happen from
experience.)

> > Things that often need architecture-specific support for a new
> > architecture include:
> >  * guile-X.Y (cross support)
> >  * libgc
> 
> Above 2 are not [yet] supported but seems to be easy ones.

guile-X.Y is quite mechanical, yes. libgc can be a little more
difficult.

> >  * libxcrypt (symbols)
> 
> Not sure about "libxcrypt" (whatver that means), but libgpg-error supports ARC since 2018, see:

https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/libxcrypt

> https://github.com/gpg/libgpg-error/commit/48c8f8ddfc80551db7615e1eb3555c1dc3f6a657

This should be unneeded. libgpg-error now defaults to
force_use_syscfg=no and no longer needs arch-specific changes.

> >  * nspr
> 
> Done in 2019, see https://hg.mozilla.org/projects/nspr/rev/cc73b6c7dab2e8053533e1f2c0c23dc721e10b76

Great.

> >  * openssl (packaging)
> 
> Not sure what needs to be done here as I know we build a lot of complex
> things with OpenEmbedded/Yocto and openssl libs are being built for sure.

https://sources.debian.org/src/openssl/1.1.1j-1/debian/patches/debian-targets.patch/

> > Are any of these fixed or confirmed working for arc?
> 
> See above, quite some do work.

Impressive. Some work is left. What also is left is demonstrating that
it actually works. It seems that Vineet is working on integrating it.

Helmut