[pkg-crosswire-devel] Bug#913782: RM: bibletime [alpha hppa hurd-i386 kfreebsd-amd64 kfreebsd-i386 m68k powerpcspe ppc64 sh4 sparc64 x32] -- ANAIS; RoM; on non-current archs it depends on broken libsword11v5

[James Clarke]

On 15 Nov 2018, at 16:04, Daniel Glassey <wdg at debian.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 15, 2018 at 5:57 PM James Clarke <jrtc27 at debian.org> wrote:
>> On Thu, Nov 15, 2018 at 11:59:40AM +0700, Daniel Glassey wrote:
>> > Package: ftp.debian.org
>> > Severity: normal
>> >
>> > bibletime 2.11.2 only builds on amd64 arm64 armhf i386 mipsel
>> > bibletime 2.10.1 is still in unstable for the other archs. It depends on a
>> > version of libsword11v5 that does not contain the lib that it was
>> > linked against so is unusable. (same as #913070)
>> 
>> This request doesn't at all make sense and highlights a bug in your
>> package.
>> 
>> Firstly, the fact that 2.10.1 depends on libsword11v5 is irrelevant, but
>> does explain why libsword11v5 is still in the archive despite
>> libsword-1.8.1 being the new package name.
> 
> It isn't irrelevant but hopefully the upload to come will make it so, so no need for me to explain.
>  
>> Secondly, why is it that bibletime is limited to these few
>> architectures? In the changelog and your commit you say "update
>> architectures to satisfy policy 5.6.8", which is completely useless
>> (*why* can we only ever build on those architectures?), and policy has
>> this to say:
>> 
>> > Specifying a list of architectures or architecture wildcards other
>> > than any is for the minority of cases where a program is not portable
>> > or is not useful on some architectures. Where possible, the program
>> > should be made portable instead.
> 
> BibleTime was changed for version 2.11 to use Qt5 instead of Qt4 including a build-dep on qtwebengine5-dev.
> 
> libqt5webengine is only available on those 5 archs so it is all that bibletime 2.11.2 built on.

So? Build dependencies not being available is not a reason to limit the
Architecture field. The *only* reason to have an architecture whitelist is if
your package has lots of architecture-specific code and there is no way it
could ever work on a different architecture without large changes *to the
package itself*. It's always better to use "any" if in doubt; either the build
will fail, so porters are aware the package needs fixing, or it has a build
dependency on something not currently built, and so will just wait until the
dependency is built (drawing attention to the fact that that dependency is
important).

>> Is bibletime really that non-portable? The list of architectures seems
>> extremely specific and unlikely, especially given that bibletime has
>> previously successfully built on many other architectures than these.
>> Unless bibletime has architecture-specific assembly or similar, put this
>> back to "any" and this RM should no longer be necessary.
> 
> But I've found that it turns out that it is supposed to work with qtwebkit5 an alternative to qtwebengine5 so I'll close this bug with an upload with an alternative build-dep on qtwebkit5-dev and see how it goes.

Alternative build dependencies are discarded by wanna-build so that doesn't
actually let the package build on architectures with libqt5webkit5-dev. If you
want to use qtwebkit on some architectures, you need the appropriate
architecture restriction lists in your Build-Depends field.

James