[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#728650: Bug#728650: Bug#728650: FTBFS on PowerPC, patch attached.

[Charles Plessy]

Le Sun, Nov 03, 2013 at 08:44:01PM -0700, Adam Conrad a écrit :
> On Mon, Nov 04, 2013 at 08:36:52AM +0900, Charles Plessy wrote:
> >
> > I would recommend to simply stop distributing it on PowerPC, and invest further
> > work only if we have a user asking for it.
> 
> Well, if you make that argument, you may as well stop building it on almost
> all arches, as most use the generic C implementation.  I think there's value
> in building on all arches, even if you think your target audience might not
> care, in that porting to multiple arches keeps the code a bit more clean and
> sane and generally portable, plus if someone comes along on ARM, installs it,
> says "man, this is kinda crap", they may well be inclined to do a VFP or NEON
> port and contribute it.  That's a lot less likely if you just shun arches
> that don't have an optimised backend available.

I think that we have to think about what we really want to achieve, and focus
our efforts on that goal.  Source code can be optimised endlessly.  If you have
fun porting hmmer, then you may find doing it valuable, but if your goal is to
make Debian better on architectures other than amd64, then I am sure that there
are more relevant packges to start with.

In doubt, let me re-state that porting hmmer is probably a waste of time,
especially considering that we have hmmer3 in our archive, which makes hmmer
quite historical...

However, if you are intersted in porting on ARM, there was an exciting
discussion last month on the debian-med mailing list, where we learned about a
project of using Raspberry Pis in a practical course of bioinformatics.  This
is not a Debian project, but there can be good synergies where I am sure that
your help will be welcome, not only for fixing bugs, but also for implementing
and running regression tests, in order to detect bugs that are not revealed at
build time.

Have a nice day,

-- 
Charles Plessy
Debian Med packaging team,
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan