Re: About a mass bug report not based on Sid or Jessie.

[Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org>]

Le Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 05:12:32PM +0200, Matthias Klose a écrit :
> 
> it would be much more productive for Debian if you wouldn't claim wrong things
> and start fixing the issue in at least this package.  The mass-filing proposal
> was sent in January to this very list. It's not my problem if you don't read
> this list or ignore proposals for mass bug filings.
> 
> The bug itself (#744664) is not fixed in 1.13.5-1.1, the issue that you merged
> back (thanks for this) was a build failure on arm64.  This is a build failure on
> ppc64el.  The reason for this are outdated libtool.m4 and/or aclocal.m4 files,
> resulting in shared libraries not being built.  Please note that exactly this is
> mentioned in the bug report. You did close it apparently without reading. And
> without fixing.

Hi Matthias,

Thanks for your post in January (https://lists.debian.org/52D81606.4030701@debian.org).

Next time, please consider adding such an URL near the top of the bug report
instead of expecting people to remember that the bug they see in April with a
package version from November is related to a mass filing proposed in January…

I indeed noted that the patch sent uses autoreconf instead of dh_autotools-dev,
but your email states:

    “The package fails to build on ppc64el (powerpc64le-linux-gnu), because
     the config.{guess,sub} files are out of date”

The only mention of libtool.m4 is, further down in the message:

    “After the build on any architecture, and before a clean, a grep for
     powerpc64le in the configure, aclocal.m4 and/or libtool.m4 file(s)
     should print some lines. It is not enough to just update the
     config.guess and config.sub files.”

I thus disagree with you that the issue with libtool.m4 it is “exactly
mentionned in the bug report”.  Please understand that for a bug report on an
outdated package, I did not want to make a fresh build just to figure out.

Nevertheless, with these mass filings where we add en masse the same option to
many packages, I wonder if we are doing something wrong.  Don't we use
debhelper and CDBS to have reasonable defaults ?  Are there more packages that
fail to build after autoreconf, than packages that fail to build without ?

Cheers,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan