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)?
hi Rafael, thanks for looping me in.
@Adrian,
as Rafael mentioned, the crash was caused by is compiling libCGAL based executables when building iso2mesh-tools, which is a dependency of octave-iso2mesh.
Most of these errors were caused by "virtual memory exhausted" error by gcc during compilation. I've seen similar errors when submitting iso2mesh for Fedora previously, see
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1758626#c11
one of the failed builds can be found at the below link, but the
log files seems to no longer exist
https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=38115425
occasionally, the build may go through, but often times, it comes back in the next build attempt.
I'd love to make iso2mesh available on all supported platforms
(which it should compile if given enough virtual memory), but
given the unreliable compilation, excluding some of these platform
is just practical workaround. Eventually, we can either solve this
issue by fine tuning the build system virtual memory parameters,
or work with CGAL developers to find out if there is a flag to
reduce memory overhead. I suppose this issue is not alone, and
should appear on other utilities that depend on libcgal-dev.
if anyone knows other workarounds to build libcgal-based binaries
on embedded processors, we are happy to know and implement.
Qianqian
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