Bug#1039051: Bug#1125294: gforth: Should gforth be removed from unstable?
On Mon, Jan 12, 2026 at 05:45:04PM +0100, Andreas Tille wrote:
> Am Mon, Jan 12, 2026 at 02:19:18PM +0100 schrieb Anton Ertl:
> > > I suggest removing gforth from Debian for the following reasons:
> > >
> > > * It accumulated one RC-bug:
> > > #1067376 gforth: FTBFS: make[1]: *** [Makefile:655: build-libcc-named] Error 1
> > > * Another bug report claims
> > > #935487 gforth: Packaged gforth version is very old.
> > > which makes me wonder whether our package is helpful for gforth users
> >
> > Gforth as distributed with Debian 12 or earlier has the following uses
> > for Gforth users:
> >
> > 1) If they just want to run or develop some Forth programs while using
> > Gforth documentation from the web, or other Forth documentation.
> >
> > 2) If they want to build the bleeding edge Gforth from git (for
> > bootstrapping; building from the tarball works without an installed
> > gforth, and tarballs for snapshots are typically released every few
> > weeks).
>
> If you talk about Debian 12: The removal of packages is happening in
> unstable and would not affect Debian 12.
Yes. I mentioned Debian 12 because I have not tried the current
unstable package to confirm that it is still good for these uses (it
probably is).
> > I have also invested a lot of time in the performance of Gforth, and
> > Debian's default use of --no-dynamic disables much of that work; but
> > that affects only people who use Gforth for programs that consume
> > significant time.
>
> Can you please be more verbose about thiis option? I have migrated
> the packaging repository of gforth to salsa.debian.org and enabled
> Salsa CI. Thus you can see a build log there[1].
>
> I do not see any sign of "Debian's default use of --no-dynamic".
> What exactly do you mean?
Line 1048 of https://salsa.debian.org/debian/gforth/-/jobs/8878227
contains
no_dynamic_default=1 dh_auto_configure ...
This means that the configured gforth works by default as if it was
invoked with --no-dynamic. You can still explicitly enable dynamic
native code generation with --dynamic, but for gforth-0.7, this no
longer has an effect: Gcc-7 and later generate code in a way that
makes the sanity checks of Gforth-0.7 disable --dynamic; we have a
workaround in development Gforth, but have not backported it to
gforth-0.7.
I'll discuss the other points with Bernd Paysan before answering them.
- anton
Reply to: