Re: PowerPC buildd is looking for a new home
On Fri, May 11, 2007 at 06:34:31PM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> although this thread is not mega-friedly, I think that it gives the
> opportunity to ask to the powerpc porters and buildd admins their
> opinion on wether Debian needs a G5 machine or not.
Notice that the augsbourg machines are quad power5 IBM boxes, and no
mere G5 machines.
> One first argument is that G5 is faster, and that it is not because the
> current buildd was not overloaded in the past that it will not be in the
> future. Indeed, it was quite loaded this week.
>
> But I have another concern. In my experience, some debian source
> packages do not build on G5 running the Debian powerpc port because
> their ./configure scripts get confused by the "ppc64" string in the
> uname output. Depending on how widespread this problem is, this has two
> consequences:
My opinion, is that such packages are buggy, and the problem should be
fixed, probably at the build infrastructure level, with some smart
substitution, if it has not been fixed already. I have not yet seen any
such problem, and ubuntu use powerpc64 hardware as their powerpc
buildds.
Also notice that the only currently selling powerpc hardware is :
1) IBM server hardware
2) Genesi efika
3) Sony PS3
4) mercury blades.
5) a splattering of embedded devices not really suited to compiling
packages on it.
Except the Genesi Efika, all of those are powerpc64 machines.
> a) Unless it is accepted that a debian package needs only to be
> buildable on buildds, and not on any machine of the same arch, it could
> mean that a big part of the archive would be FTBFS on powerpc.
Huh ? Why should they FTBFS on a 32bit powerpc machine ? I understand
from the above that it could fail on powerpc64, but i have some trouble
following you the other way around.
> b) As long as the problem is not fixed, the question of having or not a
> G5 buildd has a clear answer : No.
>
> Clearly, pbuildding the whole archive on a G5 would give intersting
> data. I am trying to do this, but due to my low level, I do not know
> when I will succeed. Feel free to overtake me !
As said, ubuntu does this regularly since years.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
Reply to: