[Debian-science-sagemath] Getting sagemath back into testing

[Tobias Hansen]

On 10/31/20 6:47 AM, Julien Puydt wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Le vendredi 30 octobre 2020 à 21:53 +0000, Tobias Hansen a écrit :
>
>> - giac needs to transition to testing. The problem are failing tests
>> on ppc64el and s390x.
> First there was a bug I couldn't track on S390X. I tried to get
> upstream to sign his key so he could get access to a porterbox, but:
> "My key is on the university server and you know it's me, so why
> bother?"... I tried to argue, to no avail. So I was thinking I would
> disable this architecture, unsupported upstream.
>
> Then upstream included a (forked) micropython in the source code, with
> hand-written compilation for the library. That broke PPC64EL. Again,
> upstream didn't really want to work on the matter. I wanted to try
> writing a better compilation of that library (libtool is complex, but
> there's a couple reasons why!), but that didn't happen for personal
> reasons. So I think I'll disable that architecture too (same reason).
>
> Now that raises a couple of questions :
>
> - is it possible to write something like: "Achitecture: all !s390x
> !ppc64el" or do I really have to list all architectures? (if the answer
> is: list, then that's a good wishlist bug...)

No, it is not possible, see

https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-controlfields.html#s-f-architecture

I think this came up already many times and won't change, since many tools would have to be changes and maybe for deeper reasons I don't know.

>
> - do I need to add Architecture: to all packages or will doing this for
> the libgiac package be enough -- all others depend on it after all?

You would have to use the list for all packages that are currently Architecture: any. One package that does this is openblas.

Another possibility would be to ask the release team to remove the binary packages for the problematic architectures from testing (and let the builds continue to fail on these architectures). If there are no old packages for an architecture in testing, missing binaries do not prevent testing migration (as far as I know, maybe with the exception of amd64 and i386).

See https://wiki.debian.org/ftpmaster_Removals

Best,

Tobias