[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#909071: pbbam: FTBFS on every release architecture where it previously built (fwd)

[Steve Langasek]

On Tue, Feb 05, 2019 at 09:45:33PM +0100, Andreas Tille wrote:
> Hi Steve,

> On Tue, Feb 05, 2019 at 12:06:22PM -0800, Steve Langasek wrote:
> > On Tue, Feb 05, 2019 at 09:35:23AM +0200, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> > > And then there is the unrelated #908269 that currently prevents testing 
> > > migration of pbbam.

> > > Steve seems to be addressing this with
> > > http://launchpadlibrarian.net/409374477/pbbam_0.19.0+dfsg-1ubuntu3_0.19.0+dfsg-1ubuntu4.diff.gz

> > Yes, but the net result of this change is that now the autopkgtest fails by
> > running out of memory during the package build at test time, which is why I
> > haven't submitted a better patch to the BTS.

> > I think the ideal here would be to either have a way to generate just the
> > single data file we need for the tests, or to capture that file from the
> > package build and ship it in a binary package, so that we don't have to do a
> > full rebuild during the autopkgtests.

> Thanks a lot for the time you have spent into this leaf package.  I
> think it is absolutely realistic that this package these days and also
> for the next couple of years will be practically used only on amd64
> architecture.  It might be sensible to draw a line here and simply
> declare this package and its rdepends "Architecture: amd64" and move on
> with problems that might affect more users and realistic applications
> for other architectures.

> What do you think?

I have no opinion.  I recognize that pretty much everyone working in this
domain is using x86, but I also know that Debian and Ubuntu run quite well
on both arm64 and ppc64el servers (the other two architectures pbbam
supports); and Amazon has recently announced ARM64 cloud instances which are
a fraction of the price of x86; so if I were the maintainer I would probably
leave these enabled.

Regardless, the autopkgtest problem is not amd64-specific, because at least
for Ubuntu, we do not size our autopkgtest runners any differently on amd64
than on other architectures.  Fixing the autopkgtest to not require a full
source build for one data file would allow the autopkgtest to run (and
likely succeed) on all available archs.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                   https://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org
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