NAME

       perl-cross-staging - Long term maintenance of cross-build support for the Debian
       configuration of perl

SYNOPSIS

       perl-cross-staging

       perl-cross-staging takes no commands or options.

DESCRIPTION

       perl-cross-staging supports the long term maintenance of cross-build support for the
       Debian configuration of perl.

       perl-cross-staging assists in the producuction of config files from the current perl build
       tree to update existing perl-cross-debian support by staging native builds of perl patched
       to support perl-cross-staging.

       Config files generated by perl-cross-staging need substantial manual editing and updating
       before being usable for a cross-build or inclusion into perl-cross-debian.

UPDATING CROSS CONFIG FILES

       Each new version of perl introduces and rearranges the existing config values and the
       config.h and config.sh files for each variant need to be updated.

       Some sections simply need to be moved around within the file for easier comparison, some
       sections will be new (and may need adjustment if the new values are
       architecture-sensitive) and some may need to be removed. Some values include the version
       string of the perl version being built. Some values include the name of the compiler or
       preprocessor. There are values which specify the original build directory and these need
       to be replaced with PERL_BUILD_DIR:

           installarchlib='PERL_BUILD_DIR/debian/tmp/usr/lib/perl/5.16'

       Missing values will be easiest to spot as these cause the build to fail with invalid
       preprocessing directives.

           config.h:2229:3: error: invalid preprocessing directive #HAS_STATIC_INLINE
           config.h:2766:3: error: invalid preprocessing directive #HAS_SOCKADDR_SA_LEN
           config.h:2773:3: error: invalid preprocessing directive #HAS_SIN6_SCOPE_ID
           config.h:3614:3: error: invalid preprocessing directive #HAS_PRCTL
           config.h:3615:3: error: invalid preprocessing directive #HAS_PRCTL_SET_NAME

       Probably the biggest problem is reorganisation of the files which arises because the files
       are all generated, rather than edited. This can easily lead to sections being added in one
       place of the file and being repeated (with differing values) elsewhere. Use a comparison
       tool like meld to push snippets in and out of the staged files with usable previous/next
       search/find regexp support.

       Once one of the variant files has been updated, merge the changes into the other staged
       variants before comparing those with the files from the previous version of perl.

       Old perl version strings also need to be updated.

ARCHITECTURE

       Typically, perl-cross-staging is run for the native architecture on the expectation that
       most of the updates to the staged files will include changes for the cross architecture.
       e.g. updates for 5.16.2 were prepared by staging amd64 and porting the updates into the
       cross architecture files for 5.14.2.

       perl-cross-staging does support attempting to stage a cross build but this has not been
       tested. Please report success or failure.

UPSTREAM SUPPORT

       Note that work is ongoing to get perl cross-building upstream and this is not complete.
       perl-cross-staging will need changes once this work is complete. The aim is to make it
       easier to obtain the configuration value cache for architectures where real hardware or an
       emulation model can be accessed over a network. This work takes place at
       https://github.com/codehelp/perl/tree/jrobinson/configure-for-cross which is
       intermittently pulled into the main cross-configure branch at
       https://github.com/castaway/perl/tree/jrobinson/configure-for-cross

BUGS

       Currently perl-cross-staging does not substitute the working directory for PERL_BUILD_DIR
       in the .sh scripts - this is left as one of the manual steps required before including the
       generated files into perl-cross-debian.

AUTHOR

       Neil Williams <codehelp@debian.org>
           Wrote this manpage for the Debian system.

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright © 2012 Neil Williams

       This manual page was written for the Debian system (and may be used by others).

       Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of
       the GNU General Public License, Version 2 or (at your option) any later version published
       by the Free Software Foundation.

       On Debian systems, the complete text of the GNU General Public License can be found in
       /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL.