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Requesting a new project: crossroad

Checklist

  • Project details filled by requestor
  • Project contacts filled by by requestor
  • CoC section filled by requestor (waiting for confirmation it will be hosted before pushing a commit)
  • GitLab project information filled by requestor (or N/A)
  • Mailman information filled by requestor (or N/A)
  • Web hosting information filled by requestor (or N/A)
  • Project creation request acked & scheduled by admin
  • Project created

Project details

As per the pypi page, which I currently use as the home page for crossroad:

Crossroad is a command line tool to easily set up your shell environment for cross-compilation, on a GNU/Linux distribution.

Be aware that this is essentially a developer tool. Its target audience are developers working on UNIX systems (tested on GNU/Linux systems: Debian, Fedora, Linux Mint, and Mageia, and expected to work on other distributions), and wishing to cross-compile projects from the same platform. It is not for end-users, and is useless in running software, only building them.

Basically originally I created this projecty to debug or sometimes even develop for Windows while never leaving my Linux environment. Nowadays, I even use crossroad as a daily development tool since I use it even for native builds as I extended the project as a helper to set separate build environments in just a command (note: this is not a sandboxing tool, and it doesn't have any security concepts; it's really a helper tool to automatize things people used to do manually with per-projects and manually maintained scripts).

Last but not least, it is used in CI to build projects for Windows or other targets (Android, ARM, etc.). This is very useful when we only have Linux runners, or because it is sometimes much much faster to build on a Linux runner with a cross-compiler (though meson kinda improved it lately, it is a pain to run Makefile-based builds on Windows, i.e. that CMake/autotools using projects are sometimes better built with crossroad on Linux than natively).

I currently (and for a few years now) use crossroad on CIs of projects I maintain, e.g. uchardet and GIMP. I know various other projects use crossroad as well.

Regarding Freedesktop's mission statement: crossroad is not necessarily targetting FLOSS desktops, though it can too (the original goal is really to simplify cross-compilation while staying in your favorite development environment; it really makes a huge deal of fixing bugs easily for platforms you don't even use). It's a very good tool for multi-platform projects where some of the developers are Linux-based while still wanting to fix bugs on other platforms.

I guess in this regard, we can consider that crossroad is part of the extended goals of freedesktop.

Why I really prefer to host it on Freedesktop is because it's a "neutral" place for FLOSS developers, away from the notion that a project is specific to a group of developers. It's for everyone.

Last point: I've started developing crossroad in 2013, and up to this day, it was hosted on Tuxfamily git: https://git.tuxfamily.org/crossroad/crossroad.git

From time to time, I was receiving emails from people interested, and lately again, someone wanted to send me a patch (maybe they will, we'll see). Unfortunately tuxfamily doesn't provide a tracker, and while emails are fine, I think that it is time to have a proper tracker, with public discussions on a Gitlab frontend (rather than private discussions by email), to give visibility for potential contributors and encourage patches/MRs.

Project contacts

Primary project admin (GitLab username): @Jehan

Additional project contacts (GitLab usernames):

Code of Conduct

  • My project agrees to the Code of Conduct
  • Where reasonable, we have placed links to the CoC within our project

I will happily add a link in our README, just as I did when I hosted uchardet on Freedesktop. When you'll confirm that crossroad can be hosted here, I'll do this and this second checkbox can be checked.

CoC contacts (if different from overall project contacts):

GitLab project

  • New GitLab group name: crossroad

Mailman lists

  • Mailman list: not needed. The gitlab should be enough.

Web hosting

Edited by Martin Roukala
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