On Sun, 23 Aug 2015 13:30:40 +0200, Aurelien Jarno <aurel...@aurel32.net> wrote: > On 2015-08-22 19:19, Steve Langasek wrote: > > On Sat, Aug 22, 2015 at 10:52:38PM +0200, Aurelien Jarno wrote: > > > I therefore believe that we should try to work to ensure arch:all > > > packages can be built on all major architectures. That said, as a > > > maintainer of such a package, I understand there is still some work to > > > do first, for example by getting cross-compilers in the archive to build > > > the firmwares. It would be quite interesting to build a list of such > > > packages to have a better view of the work that has to be done. > > > > Unless there's other demand for these cross-compilers in the archive, this > > sounds like a lot of busywork. Sure, a cross-compiler is a good option > > for building firmware for some qemu architecture that's not self-hosting > > in Debian, but are you really volunteering to maintain a sparc > > cross-compiler just for openbios? > > Yes, and I already do that. For almost a year now, openbios can be built > on all architectures. And the code for doing that is just less than 100 > of lines (see debian/cross-toolchain.mk). I still have to do the same > for the other similar packages.
The way I understand Steve's email is that he's thinking of an actual SPARC cross-compiler package... I think your (Aurélien's) approach is the right one: CPU time is now so cheap on our big architectures that building a (small) cross-compiler during a package build makes sense, at least when weighed against the maintainer burden of a full-blown cross-compiler package. It may seem sensible to introduce a cross-compiler package to support building some piece of software in the archive, but once that cross-compiler package is in the archive users find other uses for it; in absolute terms that's probably a good thing, but it means more work for the maintainer who initially just set out to make things buildable. > > > So in short we should try to fix these packages, but given they are not > > > always easy to fix, we should just temporarily allow the upload of such > > > binaries. > > > > This means that, in the meantime, we continue to be unable to prove the > > correctness of (some subset of) the binary packages in the Debian archive. > > I don't see why convenience of being able to rebuild an arch: all package > > on arbitrary architectures, something that up to this point has never been > > supported, should block / take precedence over providing our users the > > surety of reproducible builds. > > It's clearly going to block reaching 100%, but it's not a good reason > enough to block everything when we can easily reach 99.9%. Yes. Plus we have enough porterboxes to prove correctness of the binary packages anyway, it just has to be done manually (or am I missing something?). Regards, Stephen
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