[Pkg-gnupg-maint] Bug#730271: gnupg: Future FTBFS: gnupg attempts to build mpi on Windows and fails

[Werner Koch]

On Sun, 22 Dec 2013 00:30, skitt at debian.org said:

> The problem is that we build gnupg for Windows in Debian so it can be used in
> the Windows-based installer. So we need to fix anything which causes the

I know.

> Windows-specific bugs in Debian packages, given that it's reasonable for
> maintainers (and upstreams) to not care about that platform. In this
> particular case the fix is easy enough, so I was hoping you would merge it

The thing is that for 13 years I am releasing Windows versions with each
GnuPG 1.x release.  I also did this with the latest 1.4.16 and
experienced no problem.  Well, I may have not updated the toolchain for
several months which is the reason that I have not run into this bug.

So, if I now update the toolchain I will run into this bug push a fix
for it and if hopefully not too early again, I do another release and
find out that the toolchain has another bug and the whole thing starts
again.  The problem is the instability of mingw stuff - it might be
worth to think about maintaining a stable (ie. all bugs known) toolchain
package and a bleeding-edge package.  Windows is indeed important and
we somehow need to find a way to isolate us from these regressions.

This particular case might not be too troublesome but we have seen
stealth bugs in the past which took long to be detected (unsigned long
printf format) and for years is was not easy to figure out whether a
workaround was required or not.


Shalom-Salam,

   Werner

-- 
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