As mentioned in Snapcraft Office Hours #2-2017-07-07, cross compiling for go plugin has been well supported. still there is a great need to support Python plugin
Hence as @kalikiana suggested, I open this post for discussion on the progress and the testing of cross-compiling support for python plugin.
Thanks for opening this topic!
I’ll be posting here soon when I’ve got some code.
I did some research and found distutilscross which seems to make setup.py aware of cross-compilation if a few environment variables point it to the desired configuration. So far so good.
Unfortunately installing python3-dev for a target architecture, eg. python3-dev:armhf, conflicts with native packages. I’ve seen this happen with glib2.0-dev before, but in this case it’s worse because it affects non-development packages as well and in the attempt I removed snapd among other important things. This seems like a no-go because it’s unusable on a desktop machine.
I’m going to look into downloading Python binaries separately to avoid this problem.
Hey @kalikiana any updates on this issue? Is conflicting python versions still the blocking problem?
Any updates on this feature @kalikiana? This would be nice to have native support in the python plugin.
And since multipass has been integrated with snapcraft, does that change the feasibility of this?
Would it help for tracking to enter this as a feature request into launchpad?
Any update on when cross compilation is supported for the python plugin? I am really looking forward to have it for arm.
Thanks
Hey, I’ve made a Docker image for cross-compiling any unsupported snap on the armhf architecture. I’m using it routinely to build my node.js based snaps, which require native compilation and do not offer native snapcraft cross-compile support.
You’ll find the instructions here: https://github.com/dawidcrivelli/snapcraft_armhf . The readme supposes you have your sources in a src subfolder, but that’s very easily changed. Just use change the line
docker run -d --rm -v $PWD/build/armhf:/build snaparm sh -c "snapcraft clean && snapcraft"
to
docker run -d --rm -v ANY_ABSOLUTE_PATH:/build snaparm sh -c "snapcraft clean && snapcraft
You’ll find the compiled _armhf.snap file in the path you specified 
Hi @dawid, sorry for the late reply. Thanks for the great docker solution. I got it working with this
One small note: In your readme are some spelling mistakes (snacraft)
Thanks a lot
Now I’d like to move to snapcraft 3.x 
Does someone has experience to do cross-compilation to armhf with snapcraft 3.x. @dawid did you already experiment with that? Thanks
Any update on cross compilation support for python plugins?
Just wanted to ask again if anything is planned for the future to have cross-compile support for python. It would be very helpful for us
Any update on the cross-compile feature for python? Would be great to get an update on the status
There are no plans, sorry. If someone wants to contribute a very robust implementation which can deal with C-bindings we might consider it. In the meantime, snapcraft remote-build (available on 3.9.1 on the candidate channel) is the next best alternative for public projects
Are there any updates on the cross-compile feature for python? Thanks
Sorry, but no one has yet proposed a solution for this.
Yo, it’s me, the necromancer, digging around in the archives again.
I was gonna take a look at that docker image, but I also wanted to poke y’all about Python cross compilation support again. Why does it not support cross-compilation? Is it just problems with package conflicts? Has anybody picked this up again?
Sorry to @ you directly, but Have you had any progress on this?
