Re: bugs in bootstrap.debian.net (was: Re: The state of cross building)
Hi Wookey,
On Wed, Feb 03, 2016 at 02:49:07AM +0000, Wookey wrote:
> I see that there is now a lintian check for this issue whcih is great,
> and gives us some idea of how big it is:
> https://lintian.debian.org/tags/old-style-config-script-multiarch-path.html
>
> So that lists 240 packages which are MA:same and also contain an
> arch-specific foo-config script.
The assumption that the tag would only hit MA:same packages is wrong. It
hits e.g. libgpg-error-dev, which is correctly not marked MA:same. In
defense, this tag is very young and correctly marked with with low
confidence.
> A second part of this problem is that foo-config scrips sometimes do
> more than pkg-config does. They are used to supply other information
> about the build environment. I understand that xapian is an example of
> this.
Another example for seeing pkg-config too limited is postgresql. #794103
> A bit of research to classify the scripts, how many packages (and
> build-dependencies which use those scripts) are affected, what our
> available solutions are and how many scripts are 'difficult', would be
> good. I have a bit of time to apply to crossing so will try to get a
> better understanding of the issue and put it on a wiki page.
Another problem is packages that ship both pkg-config files and
foo-config scripts. Those tend to be multiarch marked (hello icu
#776821), but still contain the foo-config. Thus reverse dependencies
can choose whether to use pkg-config or not and tend to get this wrong
(hello libxml2). These foo-config scripts are not going away, because
non-Debian users want them for backwards compatibility. What we really
need is a way to keep shipping them, that doesn't break our own tools.
I'm not sure that a future where we have lots of libfoo-legacy-dev
packages containing just foo-config is a bright one.
Helmut
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