Re: open issues with the hppa port

[Frans Pop <elendil@planet.nl>]

Andreas Barth wrote:
> As an current exmaple, take the libcdio-transition. This transition
> needs to have updated packages xmms2, xmp and vlc. However, the
> packages are out-of-date on hppa, and for this reason cannot enter
> testing (and they depend on an old library that will go away with the
> transition).

I'm not an hppa porter and also have not looked at the current general 
state of hppa build failures, but are you sure this is a good example?

1) vlc is also not yet built on mips/mipsel, so hppa is not *the* blocking 
arch.

2) The current build was tried 3 times and failed three times with 
different errors; it also needed 3 tries on powerpc and required binNMUs 
on 2 arches. So, there *has* been action by the porters (retries) and 
clearly there are also problems with the package itself or its 
dependencies.
Is it realistic to require porters to spend a lot of time or give priority 
to such an apparently fragile package? Isn't there some obligation on the 
maintainer of the package too?

3) Looking at the error, it seems to me that this is hardly an 
architecture-specific issue:
/bin/sh ../../libtool --tag=CC   --mode=link gcc -std=gnu99 
`top_srcdir="../.." top_builddir="../.." ../../vlc-config --cflags plugin 
libflac_plugin.la` -g -O2 -Wall -Wextra -Wsign-compare -Wundef -Wpointer-arith -Wbad-function-cast -Wcast-align -Wwrite-strings -Wmissing-prototypes -Wvolatile-register-var -Werror-implicit-function-declaration -pipe -rpath '/usr/lib/vlc/codec' -avoid-version -module -export-symbol-regex 
^vlc_entry -shrext .so -no-undefined `top_srcdir="../.." 
top_builddir="../.." ../../vlc-config --ldflags plugin 
libflac_plugin.la` -Wl,--as-needed -o 
libflac_plugin.la -rpath /usr/lib/vlc/codec libflac_plugin_la-flac.lo  
`top_srcdir="../.." top_builddir="../.." ../../vlc-config -libs plugin 
libflac_plugin.la` ../../src/libvlccore.la ../../compat/libcompat.la 
libtool: link: 
gcc -std=gnu99 -shared  .libs/libflac_plugin_la-flac.o  -Wl,--whole-archive ../../compat/.libs/libcompat.a -Wl,--no-whole-archive  -Wl,-rpath -Wl,/build/buildd-vlc_1.0.1-1-hppa-1oK93U/vlc-1.0.1/src/.libs -Wl,--as-needed -lpthread /usr/lib/libFLAC.so -logg ../../src/.libs/libvlccore.so    -Wl,-soname -Wl,libflac_plugin.so -o .libs/libflac_plugin.so
/bin/sed: can't read /usr/lib/libogg.la: No such file or directory
libtool: link: `/usr/lib/libogg.la' is not a valid libtool archive

Or are you simply asking the hppa porters to be more active in filing 
FTBFS bugs against packages after build failures?

Cheers,
FJP