r747 - in /trunk/boinc-app-seti/debian: README.Debian README.Debian-source changelog rules

[Frank S. Thomas]

Hello Steffen,

On Saturday 17 November 2007 23:18, smoe-guest at users.alioth.debian.org wrote:
> Author: smoe-guest
> Date: Sat Nov 17 22:18:03 2007
> New Revision: 747

> --- trunk/boinc-app-seti/debian/README.Debian (added)
> +++ trunk/boinc-app-seti/debian/README.Debian Sat Nov 17 22:18:03 2007

> +For the SPARC architecture, we introduced a test that checks if the
> +machine is an UltraSparc and if so add "-mcpu=v9" to the compiler flags.
> +This way, the binary will no longer be executable on older machines
> +if the build daemon was an UltraSparc. Users of those systems will be
> +required to locally build the package.

I'm a bit uneasy about this change. First of all shipping a binary in the 
official sparc.deb package that intentionally fails to run on some machines 
IMO justifies a bug of severity "important" or higher. Debian packages should 
work right out of the box, without the need to recompile them. It is also not 
really easy to find out if the package was built on an UltraSparc or not, and 
therefore if it will run on a particular sparc machine or not. And how is the 
user supposed to recognize that the package needs to be recompiled? 
I think it spares us some bug reports and our sparc users some hassle if we'd 
comment out these sparc specific flags. If one wants an optimized SETI 
application, one can always download the source package remove the comments 
from debian/rules and build it with the UltraSparc optimizations.

Cheers,
-- 
Frank S. Thomas <fst at debian.org>           PGP public key ID: 0xDC426429
Debian Developer                            finger fst/key at db.debian.org
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