* Jason A. Donenfeld: > It's also easy, nearly trivial, to download toolchains. Arnd provides a > bunch with his crosstool. "Must use a toolchain from your distro" is a > requirement that affects nobody. But not everything will be built with the cross-compiler. For the kernel build tools and other userspace components, you'll need a native toolchain that can build programs that can actually run on the build host. At the very least, this means that the right search paths have to be baked into the tools, and I'm not sure this will happen automatically for popular distributions. (I only know that it wouldn't happen for glibc, but you can't really rebuild that.) This seems unexplored territory to me. The existence of working cross-tools doesn't tell us much how native builds and integration with installed native libraries will play out in practice. There's also going to be much greater variance of compilers people actually use if everyone just picks an upstream release branch snapshot at some point in time. None of this may be sufficient reason to support old toolchains. But if you require more recent versions, you really should tell people to upgrade to new distributions, or use newer toolchain versions specifically built for the distribution by their distribution vendor. And not to try to build their own toolchain. Thanks, Florian
