Outdated README.Debian for cross-compilation on Ubuntu xenial

[Tero Marttila]

On Ubuntu trusty, I used to cross-compile Golang programs for ARM devices, IIRC by installing the golang-go-linux-arm package. However, these packages no longer exist in xenial, even though it is referred to in the /usr/share/doc/golang-1.6-go/README.Debian file:

  If you get an error message like this:

    ~/gocode/src/helloworld $ GOARCH=386 go build
    go build runtime: linux/386 must be bootstrapped using make.bash

  …you are missing the appropriate golang-go-$GOOS-$GOARCH debian package,
  i.e. golang-go-linux-386 in this case.

Not sure how to get the missing stdlib linux_arm pkgs. Trying to cross-compile for e.g. GOOS=arm on amd64 results in:

    $ GOPATH=~/go GOOS=linux GOARCH=arm GOARM=5 go install -v github.com/qmsk/e2/cmd/tally
    go install runtime/internal/sys: mkdir /usr/lib/go-1.6/pkg/linux_arm: permission denied

$ lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS
Release: 16.04

$ apt-cache policy golang-go
golang-go:
  Installed: 2:1.6-1ubuntu4
  Candidate: 2:1.6-1ubuntu4
  Version table:
 *** 2:1.6-1ubuntu4 500
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

[Tero Marttila (terom)]

Workaround is to use go build:

    GOPATH=~/go GOOS=linux GOARCH=arm GOARM=5 go build -o bin/linux_arm/foo -v .

But this recompiles the entire stdlib each time.

[Hans Joachim Desserud (hjd)]

Thanks for taking your time to report this issue and help making Ubuntu.

Version 1.6.3-1 of golang-1.6 removed the outdated README.Debian, so it doesn't contain misleading instructions in the development version of Ubuntu. The bad news is that I don't think it contains updated instructions...