This probably won't get to as many developers as I'd like, but oh well... There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding about how to deal with porting bugs. Here's my feeble attempt at shattering a couple myths. Myth 1: All porting bugs are RC Truth: A "package-does-not-compile-on-architecture-X" bug is only release critical (i.e. severity "serious" and above) if the package previously built on an architecture, but doesn't do so any more. If a package has never successfully built on an architecture, it is not affected (in terms of getting into woody) by the fact that it doesn't yet work on a particular architecture. Porters *WILL* fill bugs on these, possibly with patches, but they should be set at severity "important" (which is not RC) Myth 2: My package doesn't build on architecture X, so i'll just omit that from debian/control Truth: see Myth 1, this is pointless and only makes your package more difficult to deal with. Autobuilders in general are made to ignore the Architecture setting in debian/control. If you set your debian/control to have: Architecture: alpha arm i386 ia64 m68k mips mipsel powerpc s390 sh sheb sparc sparc64 with the sole-purpose of excluding hppa, that is not only ugly, but you are likely to get bug reports and/or NMUs. There are *some* legitimate cases where a package is particular to an architecture (lilo is a good example). But if you find yourself putting more than a few architectures on the Architecture line, you should think again very carefully. <ia64 and hppa plug> Most porting bugs we've encountered on hppa and ia64 are simple to fix. We do have slightly more compiler/toolchain problems than, say, i386, but in the vast majority of the cases the bug is a real porting bug (using non-standard C++ constructs, using outdated config.{guess,sub}, etc). Debian is fortunate to have 2 ia64 and 2 hppa boxes on the *.debian.org network. All developers have access to these. Take a few minutes to make sure your package builds there too, or help fix the reported porting bugs. </ia64 and hppa plug> randolph -- Debian Developer <tausq@debian.org> http://www.TauSq.org/
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