[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#873866: Bug#873866: tophat: Please add arm64

[Alex Mestiashvili]

On 09/04/2017 12:00 PM, Wookey wrote:
> On 2017-09-04 10:06 +0200, Andreas Tille wrote:
>> Hi Edmund,
>>
>> On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 07:37:38PM +0100, Edmund Grimley Evans wrote:
>>> It seems to be possible to build this package on arm64.
>>> Is there any reason why it would not work on arm64?
>>
>> It might be that tophat builds on other architectures but it Depends
>> bowtie2 | bowtie and these are only available on the explicitly
>> specified architectures.  I could add these to Build-Depends to make
>> this more clear but I'm tempted to close this bug if you agree. 
> 
> It seems to me that if something builds (or just probably builds) on
> architectures then we should not restrict architectures just because
> of dependencies. The package will sit in 'dep-wait' until the
> build-dep becomes available (which might be a very long time, but that
> doesn't do any harm). This makes it obvious that this package is not
> known to be a problem on other arches - the build-dependency is the
> issue.
> 
> Now in this case bowtie is already built for arm64, so your reasoning
> for the arch restriction seems to be out of date.
> 
> https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=bowtie&suite=sid
>  
> So, no I don't think you should just close this. In fact I still can't
> see any reason not to let this build on arm64, (and ppc64el and s390x,
> and ppc64 and sparc64, all of which have bowtie already built). So in
> fact I think you should just remove the arch restriction.
> 
> Wookey

Well, technically it might be correct, but I doubt that there is a
working pipeline involving tophat, bowtie and friends on non-amd64
architectures.
So, at least from this point of view there might be no need in this
software on other architectures. Also supporting more architectures
means more bugs and maintenance time, especially when upstream has no
interest for this.

Alex