Bug#1034443: python3-brial: uninstallable on arcitectures where sagemath is unavailable, breaks building of singular

[Peter Michael Green]

On 23/04/2023 21:07, Paul Gevers wrote:
> Can you point to a discussion where we might draw the conclusion that 
> this is common practice or consensus? I *personally* [no hats on] find 
> that distinction a bit weird although I can see how we would come to 
> it and also why.
No, I can't point to a discussion. I vaugely remember hearing it from a 
more experianced developer (possiblly a release team member) on IRC 
years ago.

But it has been consistent with how I have seen bugs handled in practice 
over my years in Debian.

It's also consistent with how britney behaves or at least did until very 
recently. My understanging is that britney performs architecture checks 
on all release architectures where a package is built for arch specific 
packages, but only performs architecture checks on a small subset of 
architectures (when I first started with Debian it was i386 only, I 
think now it's amd64 and arm64, maybe also i386) for arch all packages.

I have vauge reccollections of a document descirbing the different 
behaviour for arch all packages in britney as a "hack", so I presume 
this is something that started as a hack and then just became the status 
quo. If you wanted your package in testing and it was arch specific you 
had to make sure it was installable on all architectures where it was 
built, but if it was arch all you did not (and often could not).

I have seen people ask the release team for exceptions when their 
arch-all package is not installable on one of the architectures where 
arch all packages are checked but I can't recall ever seeing such a 
request for an arch-specific package.

And when I look at 
https://qa.debian.org/dose/debcheck/testing_main/index.html this seems 
to back up my observation.

That does leave the question of how brial with this bug migrated to 
testing in the first place. Whether there was a recent intentional 
change in britney, whether there was a bug/glitch, or whether it was 
forced in (and if-so who forced it).
>
>>> This seems to be your real issue. Why file the bug against 
>>> python3-brial?
>> When an issue involving multiple packages shows up on my radar, I 
>> tend to start by filing a bug with the package where a fix could 
>> potentially have the most impact and cc the maintainers of other 
>> packages that are involved.
>
> Ack. And I agree with this approach. However, we are *also* in the 
> Hard Freeze, so RC bugs reports have more severe results if not 
> treated swiftly.
Agreed, given where we are in the Freeze, enough time has passed to file 
a rc bug against singular with an expression of intent to NMU. I'll do 
that later today.

I also hereby announce that I intend to NMU brial if I don't get a 
maintainer response soon.
(I am assuming Paul is posting as a release team member and not as a 
maintainer of the package, if that is wrong please speak up)