Bug#917335: arpack: FTBFS: consider disabling tests on ia64 hppa

[Drew Parsons]

Source: arpack
Version: 3.6.3-1
Severity: normal

arpack currently FTBFS on hppa and ia64.

The build itself does not fail, nor do tests explicitly fail.
Instead, the tests timeout.  This seems to be a weakness in openmpi
for ia64. I've seen similar test timeouts in scalapack, petsc, slepc.
It doesn't necessarily indicate a bug in arpack itself.

Since hppa and ia64 are minor (non-official) arches, I think Debian
archive quality is not necessarily improved by letting these mpi
timeouts prevent the package from contributing to the minor arches.
If there is any real problem with the package, it can be caught in
downstream packages or reported by actual users.

That is, what I've done in scalapack, petsc, slepc, is skip tests for
specific arches under these circumstances.  I suggest skipping arpack
tests on hppa and ia64.  This could help improve the utility of the
minor arches.

I'd recommend the pattern I used for petsc rather than scalapack,
since I made the test configuration more complex in scalapack
(skipping all tests on some arches, ignoring some test failures on
others).


-- System Information:
Debian Release: buster/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 4.19.0-1-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_AU.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_AU.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8), LANGUAGE=en_AU.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)
LSM: AppArmor: enabled