Bug#924548: gnome-core: does not actually install a desktop environment on s390x

[Simon McVittie]

On Sat, 23 Mar 2019 at 03:49:32 +0100, Andreas Henriksson wrote:
> An additional option here which I'd like to propose would be to stop
> mucking around with dependencies to try to hide problems on those
> architectures. Instead "simply" do arch-specific removal of the broken
> packages, including all their reverse dependencies.

I'd prefer this too, and this is what we tried first as a solution to
#906016; but it turns out that the GNOME team can't unilaterally do this
without help from the release team, the release team don't want to do
this without an OK from the d-i team, and the d-i team aren't sure that
it won't break the installer on s390x.

If someone from the s390(x) porting team tells us "no, we don't expect
desktop tasks to work, so it's irrelevant whether they do" then maybe that
would convince the release team, but I've been making a point of cc'ing
that list on related bugs for a while and not heard anything from them.
As a result I've only proposed solutions that the GNOME team could
implement ourselves, without external dependencies.

> will:
> - also automatically be removed from testing

Dependencies of task metapackages can't get removed from testing unless
the release team apply force (perhaps not even then, I'm not sure). The
packages involved in #906016 were uploaded in November, and didn't migrate
until after I made task-gnome-desktop installable on s390x in March.

I agree that making the full GNOME desktop work on s390x is not actually
a useful thing to be doing: there's potentially some value in being
able to run individual apps on a headless machine via remote X11, but
I don't see any reason why it would be rational to run the full desktop
environment on your $15K mainframe.

    smcv