[Debian-med-packaging] migration exception for mhap

[Afif Elghraoui]

Hello,

I'm sorry that I've been away from my email for a while. I was also
hoping for some discussion of Emilio's point.

على الإثنين 25 تـمـوز 2016 ‫09:19، كتب Emilio Pozuelo Monfort:
> Hi,
> 
> On 25/07/16 11:13, Jonathan Wiltshire wrote:
>> On 2016-07-24 23:11, Afif Elghraoui wrote:
>>
>>>> For performance reasons britney only tests installability on amd64 and
>>>> i386 (hence the message), otherwise the list would be much longer.
>>>>
>>>> A package cannot migrate if it is not installable on the test
>>>> architectures.
>>>>
>>>
>>> For the purposes of mhap, it is a package for scientific research and
>>> would probably not be usable on i386 even if it could be installed
>>> there. It requires more powerful processors than anything that is i386
>>> that I am aware of (besides am64 CPUs posing as such, but the package
>>> works on x32 anyway).
>>
>> Maybe you want "arch:any-amd64 x32" then?
> 
> I'm not sure about that. mhap is arch:all. It just happens to be uninstallable
> on some architectures because one of its dependencies isn't available
> everywhere. Whenever that dependency gets support for those architectures, then
> mhap will be installable.
> 
> This isn't different to sspace, circlator, pbalign, console-setup-freebsd,
> python-pbcore, python-pbgenomicconsensus... to name a few.
> 
> Maybe we should change our policy here or fix some stuff (including how britney
> handles arch:all packages), but we should carefully think about it and then be
> consistent about it.
> 

For the people who hold the view that, if a package of
architecture-independent files is not installable on i386, it should be
duplicated for each of the architectures on which it will be
installable, has this opinion taken the approval of the ftpmasters? I
don't think they would be in favor of the idea of wasting space on the
archive for this reason.

I completely agree with Emilio, as well as Ansgar who made this point
before[1].

Thanks and regards
Afif


1. https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2016/03/msg00415.html

-- 
Afif Elghraoui | عفيف الغراوي
http://afif.ghraoui.name