[Freemint-list] Experimental PPA for Ubuntu cross-tools

[Vincent Rivière]

On 01/05/2011 at 13:17, Adam Kłobukowski wrote:
> Why not use PPA for Ubuntu packages? You'll get 64bit packages 'for free'.

It took me 6 years, but now it's done :-)

Experimental PPA for cross-tools packages:
https://launchpad.net/~vriviere/+archive/ubuntu/ppa

For users, it is just an APT repository.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:vriviere/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cross-mint-essential

And voila:
m68k-atari-mint-gcc --version

For the maintainer, it is easy: just upload the source packages, then 
Launchpad PPA builds the binary packages for you. And for free. And quickly.

And to make that even better:

1) I have hosted the sources of Debian/Ubuntu packages on GitHub:
https://github.com/vinriviere/cross-mint-ubuntu

2) I have used Travis CI to automatically deploy changes to Launchpad PPA

Basically, whenever I commit a new patch:
- Travis CI builds new source packages and upload them to PPA
- Then Launchpad PPA builds the binary packages for all supported Ubuntu 
distributions (both 32-bit and 64-bit)

Concretely:
If all 14 source packages are modified:
- manually push a *single* commit for all changes
- Travis CI generates 56 source packages (1 for each of 4 distributions)
- Launchpad PPA builds 112 binary packages partially in parallel
And 40 minutes later, all the binary packages are ready and available for 
the users. It would have taken ages to rebuild all that stuff manually ;-)

Of course, technical details were not so easy, but now it's done, and it 
works well. I think this will replace my own Debian repository very soon.

The only remaining issue is chicken/egg problem between GCC and MiNTLib. I 
had to create fake mintlib/pml packages to boostrap first versions. I have 
recently opened an issue about this on GitHub, I'm sure we will find a clean 
solution.
https://github.com/freemint/mintlib/issues/5

-- 
Vincent Rivière