When I've crossbuilt packages such as u-boot for the armhf architecture,
I've noticed there there's no mention of crossbuild-essential-armhf or
gcc-arm-linux-gnueabihf in Installed-Build-Depends in the buildinfo, but
in reality these are the primary tools used to cross-build u-boot.

If BUILD_PROFILES includes "cross" and/or the Architecture and
Build-Architecture do not match (except for Architecture: all or
Architecture: source builds), it seems like it would be appropriate to
treat crossbuild-essential-ARCH similarly to build-essential, including
it's dependencies in Installed-Build-Depends.

Sbuild automatically installs crossbuild-essential-ARCH when it detects
that you are cross-building.


live well,
  vagrant

Hi!

[ Sorry I thought I had replied to this, but it seems I only did on my
  head… :/ ]

Right, currently the cross-building support in dpkg-dev is a bit
lacking. That needs overall improvement. Regarding the cross
build-essential, the main reason I've not added these
crossbuild-essential packages is that they are a hack that should be
replaced by proper build-essential multi-arch packages, but AFAIR
that's blocked on the introduction of packages such as gcc-for-host
and gcc-for-build and similar. My concern has been that adding support
for these would legitimize them and ossify that support. With the
understanding, of course, that this is currently somewhat counter
productive.

Thanks,
Guillem