cross-compiling modemmanager?

[W. Martin Borgert]

Hi,

to try out one or another patch, I like to compile modemmanager. My
target systems are ARM (32 bits), so naturally I like to cross-compile
it on a faster architecture. This worked well in the past (versions
0.5 and 0.6), but so far I fail with 1.10.

It seems, that modemmanager needs gobject-introspection to build
nowadays. However, according to this comment by Helmut Grohne, I'm in
trouble there:

> Anything that has gobject-introspection anywhere in
> its Build-Depends (directly or indirectly), effectively is not cross
> buildable on Debian.
...
> If you need to do cross compilation on Debian,
> avoid gnome-ish stuff.
...
> ptxdist and
> yocto use qemu for gobject-introspection.

(https://bugs.debian.org/905715#30)

Using qemu for cross-compilation is something I would like to avoid.
Using it for a complete build is very slow and using it only for
certain build steps makes the build process more complicated.

Why or for what purpose is gobject-introspection used in modemmanager?
Is there a realistic chance to leave out anything related to
gobject-introspection when building modemmanager? Like in the good old
times of 0.5/0.6? :-)

TIA & Cheers, Martin