[Pkg-electronics-devel] Packaging GHDL v5.0.1

[Carsten Schoenert]

Hello Patrick,

I'm not the primary maintainer of GHDL, that's Andreas Bombe (added to 
the recipients). But I'll try to give some feedback in general to your 
email.

Thanks for reaching out to the Debian Electronics Team to talk about the 
packaging of GHDL! Debian in general has always an interest to have a 
good relationship to the upstream projects and maintainers.

Am 08.03.25 um 16:28 schrieb Paebbels:
> Hi,
> 
> I would like to get in contact with the person(s) responsible for packaging
> GHDL, so it can be updated and fixed for a v5.0.1 release. Currently the
> packaging instructions produce broken installations on Ubuntu, Debian, ...
> I assume any OS that uses apt has broken GHDL installations.

That for sure depends a bit on the point of view. :-)
Andreas is a long time Debian Developer and he has of course reasons why 
he is doing the packaging in Debian in the way it is.
If I'm looking at your pointed issue on GH I can image for some of the 
points why you think what Debian/Ubuntu is doing is wrong Andreas has a 
different POV. I will not go into details here, that is best handled in 
my eyes by creating various issues in the Debian BTS, but based on my 
experiences where I had similar situations in and with other upstream 
projects it was often the case that upstream did not fully understand 
the FHS hierarchy and did only partially respecting the differences 
between the target platforms.

Autotools and also CMake can be tricky I don't think I know every part 
and intention of these build toolchains ;-), in summary I strongly 
believe we have in Debian well experienced people who are also willing 
help to solve issues in regard of different target platforms and also in 
supporting multi architecture installations.

> I suspect that installations are not tested, otherwise a test should have
> discovered that problem.

That again depends on what you/upstream think is a problem. The 
packaging of GHDL has some testing. For sure this can get improved, as 
mostly always it can. But writing tests has limitations (for me), I'm 
and also Andreas is doing the packaging in our free time.

Debian has build up a CI infrastructure that is triggered always once a 
new version is uploaded to the archive, or some other package, like a 
build dependency, is going to change within the Debian archive. An 
failing test run in GHDL is then preventing the migration of the other 
package(s) that did trigger the test.

We have within the debian/ folder the subfolder debian/tests/ which is 
holding all the data for these tests. GHDL has a rather small script 
right now.

> https://salsa.debian.org/electronics-team/ghdl/ghdl/-/blob/master/debian/tests/ghdl-tests?ref_type=heads

I believe Andreas is happy to get some help or suggestion what to add or 
how to improve the tests here.

> I'm here to help the package maintainers understand how GHDL gets
> configured, compiled, and tested so he/here/them can create a correct
> package description. I can also explain GHDL's backend variants mcode,
> llvm, llvm-jit and gcc.
> 
> I would also like to understand how a new version can be triggered, so GHDL
> could potentially release 4 times a year.

We have a service in Debian named 'uscan' which will run I think once a 
day to check for new upstream versions. This service has already 
detected there is a new version of GHDL available. It's integrated into 
the package tracker website about GHDL. Have look at the main window in 
the middle, it's the first line there.

> https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/ghdl

I've upstreams who contact me privately to inform me about new versions 
of there project, which is nice. And often I get some extra news too by 
such emails.

Another way you can walk is to open a bug issue with severity wishlist 
and the hint that a new version is available to get packaged. The 
package maintain will get then an email about a new bug report was raised.
I think the most comfortable way is to use the tool 'reportbug' to do 
this, but this requires a running Debian system as the tool is specific 
to Debian. But you can also use a classical email to open a bug report.

This is in principle writing an email to bugs at debian.org with some 
needed entries. You would need at least these entries in the body so the 
report gets connected to the src:ghdl package.

> Source: ghdl
> Version: 4.1.0+dfsg-4
> Severity: wishlist
> 
> Dear Maintainer,
> your writing goes here...

....
> I noticed many patches to GHDL. I would like to understand if GHDL
> should integrate these changes e.g. into ./configure or ./Makefile.in.
> Therefore
> GHDL needs feedback from package maintainers, who report bugs and
> suggestions.

In general often some patches are specific to Debian, some other patches 
are something that should go to upstream. Most of the maintainers do 
write some explanation why the patch is needed and if the patch is from 
upstream or is only needed within Debian.

Andreas has written so far I can see always some lines of explanation 
what the patch is about, what patches are good for upstream I can not 
judge. That's something Andreas would need to speak up. You can see all 
patches atm here.

> https://salsa.debian.org/electronics-team/ghdl/ghdl/-/tree/master/debian/patches?ref_type=heads

...
> The problems are summarized here:
> https://github.com/ghdl/ghdl/issues/2710#issuecomment-2267471733

These details are probably interesting for Andreas. As Matthias from 
Ubuntu also mentioned the interessting ones from your POV should get an 
bug report in the Debian BTS. So we can keep track of the issues in 
detail and an solved issue also would get documented if referenced in 
the Debian changelog.

> I also noticed GHDL was packaged multiple times also for previous GHDL
> releases, but none made it into official release repositories. What's
> missing or failing to make GHDL available?

Mostly it's personal resources and lack of time. :-)
As Debian is a project based on volunteers it's always the question if 
we have enough volunteers with enough time.
And GHDL is definitely some very specific software that requires good 
knowledge. This makes it even more difficult to find co-maintainers.

> Should GHDL's pipeline provide *.deb files via nightly builds?
> Currently, all apt based OS get a GHDL update once a year, if even.

I'm mosty biased about upstream are providing such packages. For to 
often I'v seen a to poor quality of such *.deb packages and people do 
then complain within Debian that they have problems wich such packages 
as the think they are provided by Debian.

But you are free to provide such packages! I think ideally Debian/Ubuntu 
can create something with you together so you as upstream and 
Debian/Ubuntu too have a winning situation!

-- 
Regards
Carsten