Re: Bug#980794: octave-iso2mesh: Arbitrary limitation of build architectures

[Rafael Laboissière <rafael@debian.org>]

N.B.: I am moving this discussion into the mailing list of the Debian Octave 
Group and also adding Qianqian Fang (the original developer of the 
package and also upstream author) to the Cc list.

* John Paul Adrian Glaubitz <glaubitz@physik.fu-berlin.de> [2021-01-22 12:10]:

> Source: octave-iso2mesh
> Severity: normal
> User: debian-68k@lists.debian.org
> Usertags: m68k
> X-Debbugs-Cc: debian-68k@lists.debian.org
>
> The last upload octave-iso2mesh arbitrarily limited the list of build 
> architectures on the assumption that only certain architectures have 
> buildds with enough disk spaces which is certainly not true. The available 
> disk space depends on the buildd used, not the architecture.
>
> Furthermore, it may happen that the buildd disk space fills up which can 
> happen if the machine crashes, gets automatically rebooted and the previous 
> builds are therefore not cleaned up. This is something observed on the buildd 
> blaauw which crashes regularly due to a bug in the kernel [1].
>
> Could you therefore remove the architecture limitation list or - at least - 
> re-add the Debian Ports architectures (e.g. alpha, hppa, ia64, m68k, powerpc, 
> ppc64, riscv64, sh4, sparc64 and x32)?

I am the responsible person for the build architecture limitation.  It 
was an attempt to get octave-iso2mesh into bullseye, at least for a 
limited set of release-official architectures.  However, the package did 
not yet migrated into testing, even though a request for the removal of 
the binary packages for armel, armhf, and mipsel have been filed (see 
Bug#979623).

Those architectures have been removed because the CGAL-dependent building 
consumes lots of memory.  I think that other packages in Debian are been 
hit by the same problem.

I fully agree that this is not an ideal situation.  I think that, once 
Bug#979623 is fixed, we should remove the architecture restriction.

What do the others think?

Best,

Rafael Laboissière