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Re: Why not 03 ?



Le Sun, Jun 01, 2014 at 11:07:32PM +0200, Julien Cristau a écrit :
> On Fri, May 30, 2014 at 07:21:08 +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> 
> > Perhaps we can stop overriding this option ?  For a lot of scientific
> > packages, -O3 is chosen by the upstream author, and I always feel bad
> > that if we make the programs slower by overriding it to -O2, it will
> > reflect poorly on Debian as a distribution for scientific works.
> > 
> For a lot of scientific packages, the upstream authors don't know what
> they're doing.  So I'm not sure that's much of an argument.

I think that such generalisations make Debian an unwelcoming place.  Also,
let's remember how this attitude backfires: Debian is also seen as a
distribution that breaks upstream sofware by carrying a higher than average
quantity of patches that the package maintainer doesn't fully understand.

What do we lose if we follow upstream's compiler options ?  As noted, the
program may fail to build on other architectures than amd64.  I do not think
that the unavailability of such non-core packages on other architectures is a
problem (no user base), and if they are a distraction to the porters, let's
restrict the build to amd64 more systematically: less work for everybody.

What we gain if we follow upstream's compiler options is that we will
distribute a software that is closer to what the users run when they compile it
themselves.  This is the principle of least surprise, and I do not see a reason
to deviate from it systematically, hence DEB_CFLAGS_MAINT_APPEND should be used
to override Upstream's defaults if needed, rather than the reverse.

Cheers,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan


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