[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#971755: shovill: built on architectures for which it's uninstallable

[Juhani Numminen]

Control: reopen -1

Hi,

On Tue, 6 Oct 2020 06:56:57 -0700 Steve Langasek <steve.langasek at canonical.com> wrote:
> Hi Nilesh,
> 
> The shovill package is not migratable to testing because it depends on a
> number of packages that are not portable and unavailable on !amd64 (spades,
> skesa, megahit) but a binary is built on these architectures.
> 
> Since these per-arch binaries exist, they are expected by the archive policy
> to be installable.
> 
> It looks to me like this is solvable by making shovill an Arch: all package
> instead of an Arch: any package, since shovill is a simple perl script with
> no compiled binaries.

An Arch: all package that is uninstallable on _arm64_ is not allowed to
migrate either, as specified in the configuration:
https://salsa.debian.org/release-team/britney2/-/blob/master/britney.conf#L31

excuses (https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/shovill):
> Issues preventing migration:
> shovill/arm64 has unsatisfiable dependency

My suggestion is adding dummy "Build-Depends-Arch: spades, skesa, megahit",
and making the binary package Arch: any. Then the package will probably not
be built on architectures where it is uninstallable.

More robust but verbose solution could be to additionally copy all the rest
of the Depends into Build-Depends-Arch, not just the three mentioned.

--
Juhani