On Thu, 13 Dec 2018 at 17:00:21 +0100, Emilio Pozuelo Monfort wrote:
> On 13/12/2018 16:58, Emilio Pozuelo Monfort wrote:
> > task-pkgs-are-installable-faux depends on task-gnome-desktop, which depends
> > on
> > gnome, which is removed from s390x. I'm not comfortable breaking that, you'd
> > need an ack from Cyril for that. The alternative would be to keep building
> > gnome from src:meta-gnome3 on s390x but removing the deps that are not
> > available,
> > or to apply the proposed mozjs patches from upstream to restore support on
> > s390x
> > if those are enough.
>
> Another option is to restrict the task-gnome-desktop check to !s390x. But
> again
> I'd like an ack from Cyril before doing that in case d-i needs to be updated
> to
> not offer that on s390x.
For context for those newly Cc'd:
We have this dependency chain:
task-gnome-desktop -> gnome-core -> gnome-shell -> gjs -> mozjs{52,60}
gjs recently switched from mozjs52 to mozjs60, and mozjs60 doesn't work
on s390x (#909536; about 80% of its tests fail, which means I have no
confidence that the resulting binaries would be useful or usable if
we ignored the test failures). As far as I know, the best patches we
have for that are the ones Julien Cristau tested, which might be part
of a solution but are not sufficient on their own to make a reasonable
proportion of the tests pass. (Julien, please correct me if I'm wrong?)
The GNOME team and the release team both seem to be willing to declare
that the "full-fat" GNOME desktop will not be available on s390x
machines, which are very conspicuously not available in a desktop or
laptop form factor :-) I'm fairly sure that GNOME and Mozilla upstream
have no interest in supporting s390x mainframes either. As a result we
have arranged for all the JavaScript-based GNOME packages (most notably
gnome-shell), and the gnome-core and gnome metapackages, to not be built
on s390x. However, this leaves us with an important task package that
isn't installable on a release architecture, causing migration to fail.
I suspect gnome-shell may have never worked acceptably on s390x in any
case, since mainframes are not noted for their 3D graphics hardware,
and s390x is not currently whitelisted to build the llvmpipe software
renderer in mesa's debian/rules (I believe the Mesa maintainers are
willing to enable llvmpipe on new architectures after a porter has tested
it and told them it works, so a s390x porter could usefully try that out).
The options I can see are:
* Accept that task-gnome-desktop is not going to be installable on s390x.
Change the testing migration scripts to skip installability testing for
that package on s390x, or ignore the fact that it fails. Optionally
change tasksel to make task-gnome-desktop Architecture: any, and give it
some Build-Depends-Arch that are not satisfiable on s390x so that it will
not be built there.
- s390x d-i users will not be able to install a GNOME desktop. Hopefully
the menu item would not appear, and task-desktop would pick up the
second-preference desktop instead, which currently seems to be XFCE?
- Risk: is it possible to ignore uninstallability of task-gnome-desktop
without ignoring uninstallability of other task packages?
* Require task-gnome-desktop to be installable on s390x, but modify
meta-gnome3 so that on s390x, gnome-core installs something that is not
the full GNOME 3 desktop used on other architectures, for example
the GNOME-2-derived gnome-session-flashback instead of gnome-session and
gnome-shell, and lightdm instead of gdm3.
- s390x users will not get the same GNOME desktop everyone else does.
- Risk: if GNOME Flashback becomes unsupportable in some future release
(it's a GNOME 2 derivative a bit like MATE, although without using
forks of the apps, and most upstream and downstream GNOME maintainers
don't use or maintain it), we're back where we started.
* Require task-gnome-desktop to be installable on s390x, but modify
meta-gnome3 so that on s390x, gnome-core doesn't install a whole desktop
enviroment at all, just the GNOME applications.
- s390x users will not get a GNOME desktop at all.
- Risk: this is not what the user asked for or expected.
* Require task-gnome-desktop to be installable on s390x, but modify
either tasksel or meta-gnome3 so that on s390x, task-gnome-desktop
installs some GNOME-derived but non-GNOME desktop environment like MATE.
- s390x users will not get the same desktop environment everyone
else does.
- Risk: this is not what the user asked for or expected.
I don't think waiting for someone who understands s390x to fix gjs-on-s390x
is an option, although s390x porters are very welcome to prove me wrong!
How should we proceed?
Thanks,
smcv
