Hello! I want to draw attention to, from my point of view, open questions/problems with the s390x architecture.
In short, it seems to me, that: a) there are no porters left (to fix serious problems) b) various packages already ignore s390x (gnome? others?) c) general, including upstreams, interest in s390x is not there With this context, I want to ask what the practical future of s390x in Debian should be? *** I acknowledge that s390x is the last big-endian release arch. While this fact may be the cause of interest for curious people, in general it seems to cause more problems than we need. It also appears true that IBM has an interest in s390x, but today they have no porters in Debian. While it's nice that a company has an interest in their own products, that in itself does not help us. Even if IBM staff would send patches to the BTS, someone still needs to build, verify, upload, ... maintain the relevant packages. My opinion on a)-c) was formed mostly by working (or avoiding working on) bugs involving s390x. Here are three bugs which to me sum up the current situation. #960265: s390x install Debootstrap warning: Failure while configuring base packages This bug was reported in June 2020, but it shows that debootstrap for s390x was completely broken in the buster release. I'll note that buster was released one year before the bug was reported. One of the previous porters mentioned in that bug that clearly there can be no real users, if such a problem gets into a stable release. #1068119: s390-tools: FTBFS: ... -Werror=array-bounds= New gcc upload broke building s390-tools. Time between this being found and the gcc upload was probably long. The usual mass rebuilds (by Lucas, Santiago, et al) cannot find this, as s390-tools is an s390x-specific package. Upstream fixed the problem a long time ago, but the fixes never made it into Debian. For a while this blocked migration of mmdebstrap, which has become a relevant package to Debian's package building stack. Ultimately the mmdebstrap maintainer uploaded patches from upstream to make progress. #1080317: s390-tools: FTBFS : ... -Wincompatible-pointer-types Again, another upload broke building s390-tools. Again this was very likely an undetected FTBFS for a long time. Upstream fixed the problem a long time ago. Ultimately Michael Biebl uploaded these fixes to make progress for usrmerge. In the wake of the last bug I've opened #1084987: O: s390-tools. I'll note the previous uploader of s390-tools removed themselves three uploads before their last upload from Uploaders:, and the other uploader in the list hasn't uploaded the package since 2010. Regarding upstream interest, it is clear very often this manifests in problems where software just does not build on s390x. Often this is just a broken big-endian branch, easily patched in Debian. But there are more complicated pieces of software, and they don't build, and obviously we need help from porters to fix those. *** Having now drawn attention to the state of s390x, I hope there will be productive outcomes. Maybe, motivated porters will show up and maintain the architecture and its key packages (like s390-tools). Otherwise I suggest we save us all a lot of time and stop carrying an in-Debian-unmaintained architecture. Chris
