Re: Desktops on non-x86_64 systems

["Ludovic Courtès" <ludo@gnu.org>]

Hi,

Maxim Cournoyer <maxim.cournoyer@gmail.com> skribis:

> I'd like to revise my position, as I got confirmation that it ought to
> be possible to cross-build rustc for other architectures from our
> (cleanly bootstrapped) x86_64 rustc!

[...]

> I haven't yet done any reading, but if Mutabah (the author of mrustc)
> says it's possible, I believe it!

I suspect there’s a difference between “it’s possible” and “we’ve
successfully cross-compiled Rust.”  :-)

We could try that, but IMO we first need a solution within days—we just
cannot reasonably let this branch go on for longer than that.  The
librsvg 2.40 hack would give us Xfce (maybe GNOME?) on i686 today.

Perhaps we can address all this in several steps:

  1. apply the librsvg 2.40 hack now so we can merge
     ‘core-updates-frozen’ this week for real;

  2. later on, introduce some Rust binary for non-x86_64; that would
     lead to rebuilds only on those architectures;

  3. eventually, update mrustc (and have it call gcc with -O0 to reduce
     its memory footprint), or use GCC-Rust instead of that’s viable.

WDYT?

I think we agree on the strategy and just need to agree on tactics.
:-)

Thanks,
Ludo’.