Re: Bits from the FTPMaster meeting
On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 11:40:52PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> If we mean to attract such users, I do not think that the best strategy would
> necessarly be having a pre-existing MIPS support of bioinformatics, which I
> think is completely beyond our reach and expertise. I think that what would
> matter would be to have a healthy MIPS port on one side, and be the best distro
> for bioinformatics on mainstream platforms on the other side. This would be a
> solid basis to start a collaboration to become a good bioinformatics distro on
> MIPS. Just because we can build packages is not the best indicator: most of them
> have no regression tests yet, and a significant number of the build failures
> I experienced on my packages happen during such tests???
It's a bit worrying that the software requires noticable porting effort
in the first place - often that's a sign of general fragility which will
also manifiest itself on supported arches sooner or later.
> So in conclusion (like a broken disk), with a simple modification of
> dpkg-gencontrol, we can stop building on some architectures some packages which
> bring them no added value. For new packages, that seems to be enough. For
> existing packages, maintainers who want to opt-out of some architectures would
> need to submit a patch against the packages-arch-specific file and sumbit a
> bunch of dak commands to the release file. This could be consolidated in
> batches and I can help for this, so that the work load is minimum, compared to
> the gain for everybody.
The flip side of this is that it's just inviting maintainers to decide
they can't be bothered with porting effort and leaving ports as second
class citizens.
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