* Lucas Nussbaum [Sat, 16 Aug 2008 14:10:16 -0300]:
ruby1.9 is broken on hppa: 1.9.0.1, that previously built fine (it's in
the archive) exhibits the same problems as 1.9.0.2 and 1.9.0.3.
I spent hours trying to do the hppa porters' work by investigating the
ruby1.9 build failure, with no success (and no help from the hppa
porters, except giving me access to an hppa machine, since hppa doesn't
have any developer-accessible machine maintained by DSA).
In [1], the state of hppa was already raised, and, while no real
conclusion has been drawn from this thread, it seems that, while most
people involved on hppa find it very sad (which I agree with), the right
thing to do is to drop hppa from the list of official archs for lenny,
since it's unlikely to be a "good" stable arch.
So far, I haven't heard any official position from the release team
about that,
hppa has certainly had trouble during this release cycle. However, it's
been mostly reduced to a small set of packages, and since (a) it has not
been the kind of brekage that prevents the release team from doing their
job (alpha buildd outages eg. have been more painful), and (b) the
architecture is not generally broken, it was decided not to use /our/
veto power to kick it out of lenny. (No decision taken for lenny+1 in
either direction, though.)
I realize the ruby1.9 situation is frustrating, but I don't think it's
fair to drop hppa from lenny because of it. I don't think your "it's
unlikely to be a 'good' stable arch" is true either.
Otoh, it's really commendable, and I mean it, that you decided to spend
your time towards having it fixed, rather than just kill ruby1.9 on hppa
as I suggested (which is, tbh, what I would've done in your position).
It really sucks that no hppa person is available to help, but my opinion
is that's still more valuable to release with hppa without ruby1.9 there,
than to drop hppa completely.
So, what I would like from a release POV is to wait at most for this
glibc -14 upload with context-fu on hppa that somebody somewhere said
could fix the issue,