XPost: linux.debian.ports.arm

Hello Sebastian,

(Apologies for delay, I starting drafting the email, but I had to
leave and never got back to it until now)

Was there a conclusion to the discussion on d-arm@l.d.o?

There was a compelling reason to do at least one more armel release to
have at least one official release with time64 support.
There were other comments to keep architecture for environmental
reasons, to keep supporting old devices that are still in the field,
there are lots of {sheeva,dream,*}plugs based around Marvell's
kirkwood and many NAS devices based on Orion chipsets. Martin Michmayr requested a readdition of OpenRD in stable debian-installer (https://bugs.debian.org/1068898), maybe nice to keep for this one
last release.
There was also a suggestion to mark non-for-us or stop building large
packages that may not be that useful in the armel architecture, such LibreOffice, possibly some desktops, etc.. since armel is mostly meant
for embedded and headless devices (may be some with small
screen/display).

What is the
opinion of the two porters that we currently have listed for armel
(added to CC)?

The two porters listed in the arch qualification page missed the thread. However, since packages are building on arm64 hardware, until the
hardware is capable of doing so, we should at least try to keep armel
for the Trixie release.

Regards
--
Héctor Orón -.. . -... .. .- -. -.. . ...- . .-.. --- .--. . .-.

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XPost: linux.debian.ports.arm

Hello Hector,
thanks for bringing this up!

On 2024-08-21 05:18, Hector Oron wrote:

There was a compelling reason to do at least one more armel release to
have at least one official release with time64 support.

FWIW I think this makes a lot of sense: have one stable release with
time64 support, move to ports after Trixie.

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XPost: linux.debian.ports.arm

On 2024-08-22 10:05, Emanuele Rocca wrote:

Hello Hector,
thanks for bringing this up!

¡Gracias, Héctor!

On 2024-08-21 05:18, Hector Oron wrote:

There was a compelling reason to do at least one more armel release to
have at least one official release with time64 support.

FWIW I think this makes a lot of sense: have one stable release with
time64 support, move to ports after Trixie.

Yes.

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XPost: linux.debian.ports.arm

Plus 1 from me!
Rick

On Thu, Aug 22, 2024, at 1:05 AM, Emanuele Rocca wrote:

Hello Hector,
thanks for bringing this up!

On 2024-08-21 05:18, Hector Oron wrote:

There was a compelling reason to do at least one more armel release to
have at least one official release with time64 support.

FWIW I think this makes a lot of sense: have one stable release with
time64 support, move to ports after Trixie.

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XPost: linux.debian.ports.arm

On Wed, Aug 21, 2024 at 05:18:15PM +0200, Hector Oron wrote:

...
There was also a suggestion to mark non-for-us or stop building large packages that may not be that useful in the armel architecture, such LibreOffice, possibly some desktops, etc.. since armel is mostly meant
for embedded and headless devices (may be some with small
screen/display).
...

This doesn't strike me as coming from people who have an overview of
actual issues - it would not solve any problem but would add new
problems.

armel does not have any buildd speed issues.

It is REALLY preferable to attempt to build as much as possible even on
the most obscure ports architectures, since working around something not
being available is manual work.

But e.g. building libflac needs nearly the complete Haskell ecosystem.

The build dependencies of something like git require subversion and Qt
and Java and tons of other stuff.

You can workaround such issues, but that is manual work and we are not
gaining anything.

Regards

cu
Adrian

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XPost: linux.debian.ports.arm

On Tue, Aug 13, 2024 at 08:53:44PM +0200, Chris Hofstaedtler wrote:

Hi,

On 2024-08-01 07:55:15 +0200, Hector Oron wrote:

Should Debian drop armel from the upcoming Debian release?

Was there a conclusion to the discussion on d-arm@l.d.o? What is the opinion of the two porters that we currently have listed for armel
(added to CC)?

fakeroot, a notable key part of the infrastructure required to build packages, FTBFS on armel and armhf since March, due to t64 changes
on these architectures.

I think this is indicative of the developer interest in armel and
armhf and the resulting available resources in Debian at this time.

I think this is more indicative of fakeroot being in the not uncommon
situation that this is a key part of the Debian infrastructure only
one person in Debian knows well.

I am surprised that there were uploads by the maintainer (who is also
upstream) that ignored this bug.

I am also surprised that the people from Canonical who were doing the
time_t transition ignored this bug.

It is laudable that you finally fixed it, but I'd guess you'd agree that
this required fakeroot knowledge and not arm knowledge.

And you cannot single out armel and armhf for this in general,
if the level of porter activity you expect would be a prerequisite
in trixie then not a single of the bookworm architectures would
qualify.

We do have a porter problem, but hppa, riscv64 and loong64 are the only potential architectures for trixie if continuous and proactive activity
by several porters is a hard requirement.

Chris

cu
Adrian

BTW:
It looks bogus that amd64 is exempted from the porter requirement based on
Our toolchain maintainers are happy to support amd64 as-is.
Who is responsible for fixing amd64 specific issues in non-toolchain key
parts of the infrastructure?

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XPost: linux.debian.ports.arm

On Sun, Aug 11, 2024 at 12:43:19PM +0200, Sebastian Ramacher wrote:

...
What is the opinion of the two porters that we currently have listed
for armel
...

I am not in favour of removing armel in trixie.

Cheers

cu
Adrian

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XPost: linux.debian.ports.arm

On 2024-08-13 20:53, Chris Hofstaedtler wrote:

fakeroot, a notable key part of the infrastructure required to build packages, FTBFS on armel and armhf since March, due to t64 changes
on these architectures.

I think this is indicative of the developer interest in armel and
armhf and the resulting available resources in Debian at this time.

My employer is a user of armel and armhf, but we were not aware of the
problem. I'm pretty sure, my boss had offered a "bug bounty" or
something, if I had insisted.

What would be the best way, esp. for people outside of Debian, to always
know about such problems? And not only read about it, when it's already
solved?

Cheers

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XPost: linux.debian.ports.arm
To: zeha@debian.org (Chris Hofstaedtler)
Copy: debian-release@lists.debian.org
Copy: sramacher@debian.org (Sebastian Ramacher)
Copy: zumbi@debian.org (Hector Oron)
Copy: debian-arm@lists.debian.org (Debian ARM)
Copy: arnd@arndb.de (arnd@arndb.de)
Copy: ema@debian.org (Emanuele Rocca)
Copy: bunk@debian.org (Adrian Bunk)
Copy: wookey@debian.org (Wookey)

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