What aspect of cross compilation is broken?
If it's related to native compilation we should just disable that by default on cross.

What aspect of cross compilation is broken?
If it's related to native compilation we should just disable that by default on cross.

Unfortunately it isn't just nativeComp.

As far as I can tell, nobody has ever been able to make emacs cross-compile without extremely invasive wizardry which would be a maintenance burden for nixpkgs. The biggest stumbling block is emacs' "dumper", which fundamentally requires executing hostPlatform code in order to create the dump image.

Because of this obstacle there are a large number of other cross-compilation bugs in emacs that nobody is motivated to fix. They are small ones, but because of the dumper problem nobody bothers to work on them.

It's a somewhat depressing situation :(

The biggest stumbling block is emacs' "dumper", which fundamentally requires executing hostPlatform code in order to create the dump image.

Right, I didn't think about that.
Marking it as broken is the right call.

The biggest stumbling block is emacs' "dumper", which fundamentally requires executing hostPlatform code in order to create the dump image.

In case anybody's curious: gentoo comes closest to cross-compiling emacs, but it still requires the user to run a "finish up the build process" script (which generates the dump) on the hostPlatform:

https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo.git/tree/app-editors/emacs/emacs-30.0.9999.ebuild#n532