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Re: Bits from the FTPMaster meeting



Charles Plessy wrote:
> Le Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 10:54:18AM +0000, Philipp Kern a écrit :
> 
>> there might not be clusters of arm yet but I saw offers for clusters of mips.
> 
> Hi Philipp
> 
> I also saw this cluster and got quite curious until I realised that most
> programs I package are not parallelised…

A cluster is not only about parallel programs, but also about running
single threaded applications in parallel...

> 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…

You apparently fail to see that building the packages on mips uncovers
bugs that would otherwise be there, but take a longer time to uncover on
the 'mainstream' platforms.

> 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. 

As IMHO there is added value in building a package on all release
architectures, there is no reason to change dpkg-gencontrol at all.

Cheers

Luk


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