* Olе Streicher <debian-devel@liska.ath.cx>, 2012-01-24, 14:25:
The main problem is that on the mips and mipsel architectures the packages compile but their unit tests fail - timeout on mips,
Does the test suite involve heavy floating-point computations? Two of our mips buildds, corelli and lucatelli, doesn't have FPU, so it wouldn't be surprising if they couldn't run such a testsuite in a reasonable time. If this is the case, you probably want to ask mips buildd maintainers to blacklist your package on these buildds.
and segfault on mipsel. The previous packaged version still didn't come with unit tests. I informed the upstream author, but they probably more concentrate on common platforms.I think, for practical reasons, one would not use sextractor on a MIPS machine yet, because it needs some processing power, so removing these architectures until a fix is available would be a better alternative thant using of a 6-year-old, buggy version (which never passed this kind of unit-test).
It might be true that nobody will every use the package on MIPS. It's even possible that the old package doesn't work on MIPS at all.
However it's also likely that the bug we're observing on MIPS exists also on other architectures, but it's latent there.
How should I proceed here?
File an RC bug against the package, tag it "help", send a copy of the bug report to debian-mips@lists.debian.org.
-- Jakub Wilk