[Pkg-golang-devel] Bug#780355: Build empty golang-go and golang-src packages on architectures without golang support and depend on gccgo instead

[Tianon Gravi]

On 12 March 2015 at 09:02, Matthias Klose <doko at debian.org> wrote:
> gccgo, starting with GCC 5 now ships the go tool, which allows building of most
> packages in the archive.  Instead of hard-coding any package to build-depend on
> gccgo on architectures where golang is unsupported, I built empty golang-go and
> golang-src packages which depend on gccgo instead.

I'd be a lot more comfortable with this being a deliberate change in
the package dependencies to explicitly state that they're
gccgo-compatible, especially if failure to build or failure in the
test suite is a common occurrence.  Those kinds of FTBFS also only
account for compilation bugs or ones that the project test suite
happens to catch -- what worries me even more are the more subtle
runtime bugs we might introduce with such a change.

I'm still very much +1 to using alternatives for "go" (ala #779503),
but I'm definitely not ready to claim that GCCGO 5 and Go 1.4 are
actually equivalent and compatible to the level a virtual like this
implies.

♥,
- Tianon
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