On 2013-10-19 16:38, Jeremiah C. Foster wrote: > Hello, > > On Sun, Oct 13, 2013 at 05:01:31PM +0200, Niels Thykier wrote: > > [snip freeze policy] >
Hi, I s/-arm/-ports/'ed the CC, since I figured the rest of the porters would find the answer equally interesting. >> Results of porter roll-call >> =========================== >> >> [...] >> >> That said, we would like to encourage porters behind all ports to >> ensure that the toolchain is up to date and working. We are aware of >> at least gcc on mips having its test suite disabled[GCC]. Other ports >> may suffer from similar issues and we hope to have those resolved >> sooner rather than later. We are currently waiting for the gcc >> maintainers to compile a list of such issues. > > So I can extrapolate from this that ensuring that the toolchain is up > to date and working is a key activity of a porter. Yes; build-essential being broken is obviously a problem. But also having the same default compiler on all architectures is also desired. > If my assumption is > correct, is there a complete definition of the "toolchain" as we see > it in Debian that a porter might reasonably be expected to use to do > thier porting? > I do not have an complete list of packages, although it will definitely include build-essential. My intuition is that "toolchain" should include any compiler used by packages on that architecture[1] (e.g. if the arch has built haskell packages, it should have a working haskell compiler as well). But as said, that is my personally view and not an official statement. > In addition, I wonder if there is a way to report the status of the > toolchain and what sort of expectations are there around "up to date"? I would love for us to have an automated system to give us a "weather-report" on the toolchain for each architecture. It would be nice both for us to see how ports are doing and for porters to spot and fix problems early. As for up-to-date, I don't have a complete answer here. I seem to remember the GCC maintainers being frustrated at having to maintain gcc-4.6 (it is apparently still default for some architectures) despite gcc-4.8 being the latest stable release. > Is it expected to build Debian toolchain nightly and run a specific > test suite? Is the expectation that one uses pbuilder and builds a set > of packages? What we got in the policy so far[2]: """ Installer: The architecture must have a working,tested installer. [...] Archive coverage: The architecture needs to have successfully compiled the current version of the overwhelming part of the archive [...] """ Which implies "a set of packages" being "the current version of the overwhelming part of the archive" plus all of d-i. However, that is not something you "just build", so having a smaller set as a basic test would probably be way more useful. I am not aware of such a "basic test set", so feel free to propose one. I like the "toolchain nightly" thing as well. I don't think it is "required", but it sounds like the kind of thing that would help people spot issues sooner rather than later! > Perhaps this is outlined on the wiki somewhere and if not > perhaps it ought to be? > > Regards, > > Jeremiah > > Having documentation on it would definitely be a good thing. For actual requirements, we should add them to the policy[2], but having a wiki-page of "recommended porter practises/tests" would probably be a nice addition too. ~Niels [1] My rationale for this is that we would like to be able to rebuild/reproduce builds, which would require a working compiler. [2] http://release.debian.org/jessie/arch_policy.html -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-68k-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/52654b6d.9020...@thykier.net
