[Piuparts-devel] Bug#873733: RFC: whitelist isa-support to allow it to abort installation?

[Adam Borowski]

On Mon, Sep 18, 2017 at 11:55:28AM +0000, Holger Levsen wrote:
> Dear release team,
> 
> I would like to ask you for your opinion on "#873733: please whitelist
> isa-support so it's allowed to fail piuparts testing" to prevent piuparts
> results from blocking isa-support's migration to testing. (See the (short)
> bug log for details.)
> 
> I still think that's the right thing to do (and thus to close #873733 as
> wontfix), but I also think it's up to you to decide, not the piuparts
> maintainers.

Actually, this doesn't block isa-support from migrating, it merely makes it
fail roughly half the time, as you apparently have more than one machine,
and only one has an inadequate CPU.  The last time this happened, it worked
well when retried elsewhere.

This particular binary, sse4.2-support, has not even been requested by
anyone in previous discussions; I added it merely because it makes testing
more convenient: x86 computers without sse4.2 are not a rarity (heck, this 6
years old AMD box I'm typing these words on has no 4.2) while pre-sse3 have
been purged even from storage closets by most people.

Thus, if you think so, I can drop this binary or Volkswagenize it.

So there are solutions for the piuparts testing that don't hassle its
maintainers.


The second question is: is Depends:isa-support the right solution for
software that requires above-baseline CPU extensions?  It has upsides and
downsides; in any case code common to such cases should be kept in one place
instead of being reinvented differently (like, chromium displays an xmessage
window then aborts while pcsx2 just SIGILLs).  This has been discussed twice
on debian-devel and it seemed this solution was favoured by those who
commented.  Since then, Adrian Bunk raised a different issue: that making
it too easy to violate baseline ISA risks fragmenting architectures.

That issue is worth discussing.  I wonder, should I describe use cases and
possible solutions here with the Release Team, or on a wider forum of
debian-devel or elsewhere?


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