Bug#510845: mpi-defaults: FTBFS/not available on alpha

[Manuel Prinz]

Hi Adeodato!

Am Freitag, den 13.03.2009, 21:41 +0100 schrieb Adeodato Simó:
> > Open MPI used to build fine on alpha, so this is probably a problem with
> > the new upstream release. Reassigning to Open MPI maintainers.
> 
> It’s been 2 months, and this issue has not been addressed. In the
> meantime, I’m starting to smell packages build-depending on mpi-default-dev
> that will prevent transitions from happening.

Yes, I know about that. As a result of the recent breakage, Dirk left
the team since he does a lot of stuff in Debian already, so the "team"
is actually me. I had not much time lately but took this weekend of and
am working on the problems this very moment. I'm sorry that it took so
long.

> You were right in reassigning, since openmpi should have a bug of its
> own for this failure. However, mpi-defaults is buggy as well, because
> it’s failing to provide packages for alpha.
> 
> I also see #517543 now. IMO, either that patch is correct and can be
> applied soon, or mpi-defaults needs to start thinking about using an
> alternative implementation on alpha. Thoughts?

I'm trying the patch but it does not fix the issue completely, as it
seems. I hope I can give an update in a few hours. Once this is fixed,
the build issue on Sparc can be probably fixed in a similar way. But I
have to investigate that on a porter machine since I do not own this
arch. (Well, same for alpha, but DSA kindly installed everything needed
on albeniz.)

As you may have noticed, I uploaded a fixed mpi-defaults earlier. I
discussed the alpha issue with Adam and we agreed on falling back to LAM
here. I did not know that sparc also fails then, so the "fix" will not
work; but because of sparc this time.

As for Open MPI, there are more than just build issues. I will fix these
first, but there is also the problem of an ABI change. The upload was
done a little hasty and the change not recognized, so the
build-depending packages are effected. Most of them (if not all) will
still run, but with a warning. The obviously needs to be fixed. Dirk
came up with the idea of binNMUing but that that was not very welcomed
by the maintainers of build-depending packages. I do not know what the
right approach is. Upstream is now aware of that and will be ABI
compatible starting from 1.3.2. I wanted to change the library package
name and maybe bump the SONAME, and upload that package to experimantal.
Of course, I wanted to mail the release team to coordinate that, but I
wanted to fix one issue at a time. I have not made my mind up what is
the best solution yet; just recompiling dependant packages would do the
trick; users of Open MPI are used to recompile their software anyway,
since upstream clearly stated that they never cared about ABI changes
between releases. Any input is welcome. But I'll first try to get the
package build again, collecting the broken pieces is second on my list.

Thanks for caring! And sorry for the f***-up!

Best regards
Manuel
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