dee cannot be cross built from source. There are several reasons. The immediate problem is a failure to install the host architecture python3 interpreter. It really wants to run python3 during build, so a native python3 needs to be used. This also applies to python3-gi, which is used to discover the architecture-independent override directory. Nextup, the gtk-doc scanner fails. Fortunately, dee separates the documentation to an Arch:all package. Therefore, arch-only builds such as cross builds may disable gtk-doc. Reproducible builds can be used to verify the correctness of the change. Last but not least, it performs a separate build during override_dh_install. There, configure is invoked manually and thus misses the crucial --host flag. Wrapping the invocation in dh_auto_configure fixes this. The attached patch combines the aforementioned suggestions and makes dee cross buildable. Please consider applying it. Helmut