+++ Chris Jones [2011-09-30 14:35 +0200]:
> Hi all,
> 
> I hope the cross-development gurus out there might have a simple answer
> to this question. Basically I've got an application here which I'd like
> to cross-build to run on a Balloon board. It has worked before, and
> indeed cross-builds quite happily on another machine, but on the Debian
> Squeeze box I've got set up here, fails because it can't find a header
> file in /include/libssl.
> 
> Looking at the machine which works, the offending file is present and
> correct. According to dpkg -S, it's owned by libssl-dev-armel-cross. But
> I can't figure out how to install that package. All the internet
> searching I've done has pointed to using apt-cross, but that seems to
> have gone away in Debian Squeeze.
> 
> What's the approved way of installing -dev package for cross-building
> under Debian at the moment?

xapt is the replacement. 

try xapt -b -a armel libssl-dev. It's generally recomended to run that
in a chroot so as not to pollute your main environment with a lot of
cross packages.

I could go on at great length about 15 different ways of doing this. 

The thing to understand is that libssl-dev-armel-cross is not a
'proper' package, it's generated by dpkg-cross from the armel
libssl-dev package. So something has to download the armel version of
libssl-dev, so that dpkg-cross can be run on it, giving you a
libssl-dev-armel-cross to dpkg -i.

libssl-dev-armel-cross will depend on libssl1.0.0-armel-cross and
zlib1g-dev-armel-cross and libssl1.0.0-armel-cross depends on
libc6-armel-cross and zlib1g-armel-cross

i.e you need the whole parallel armel-cross dependency tree. xapt
generally sorts this out for you, as can xdeb, and in the medium-term
future apt will just do the whole thing for you for armel, just as it
does for x86, so you'll be able to do 
apt-get -a armel build-deps-cross $package


Wookey
-- 
Principal hats:  Linaro, Emdebian, Wookware, Balloonboard, ARM
http://wookware.org/