Re: Building architecture:all packages
On Thu, Nov 10, 2016 at 08:52:15PM -0800, Nikolaus Rath wrote:
> On Nov 11 2016, Christoph Biedl <debian.axhn@manchmal.in-ulm.de> wrote:
> > b) This is a serious issue as John D. Rebuilder should be free to choose
> > on which architecture to build "src:foo".
> >
> > Personally, I tend to b) since
> >
> > * there is no sane way for the maintainer to tell the world which
> > architecture should be used to rebuild this package. The .buildinfo
> > file will solve this, still
> > * it is certainly rather unfriendly to expect John to have a box for
> > that particular architecture just to be able to do the rebuilding.
>
> That's a good theoretical argument. But in practice, I think the subset
> of architectures for which bar works correctly will always include
> amd64, and John D. Rebuilder will have access to such a box for sure.
We know this not to have been the case in the past.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/launchpad/+bug/217427 mentions the cases of
palo (hppa), openhackware (powerpc), and openbios-sparc (sparc).
(People often suggest cross-compiling for this, and that can certainly
be a good solution in some cases, but please bear in mind that in the
general case that still only reduces the problem to "can only build on
architectures where somebody's uploaded the necessary cross tools".)
There is currently one package in the Debian archive (pixfrogger) that
declares "Build-Indep-Architecture: i386" in its .dsc because, even
though it builds an architecture-independent binary package, building it
requires a package that's only available on 32-bit architectures. See
https://bugs.debian.org/534063. Conceivably this particular case could
be handled by Multi-Arch: foreign, but requiring (re)builders to have a
suitable multi-arch setup available raises the bar for them and would
certainly considerably complicate buildd infrastructure.
As I allude to in
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2016/11/msg00457.html, I think the
best answer is for Debian's buildd infrastructure to follow through on
implementing Build-Indep-Architecture. I'm not sure how this interacts
with Debian's decision to make Architecture: all buildds separate
entities, since that means it isn't just a matter of setting a "build
the arch-indep portion as well" flag when a particular buildd takes a
build; but it should still be doable somehow.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@debian.org]
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