[pkg-golang-devel] Bug#867058: golang-1.8 and mips*

[peter green]

severity 867058 serious
severity 867059 serious
severity 867062 serious
thanks

Hi golang maintainers.

Some time ago John Paul Adrian Glaubitz uploaded some golang binaries for mips, mipsel and mips64el to the Debian archive which were not built from slightly modified Debian source packages. At the same time he posted a description of the changes needed (but no actual machine-readable patches) he used as bug reports. These bug reports received no maintainer response. His binaries migrated to testing.

Having binaries that were not built from the unmodified Debian sources is a serious policy violation. Furthermore these now-outdated binaries are preventing any newer versions of the golang-1.8 package migrating to testing.

Therefore golang maintainers you have two choices.

1. Accept John's changes so that your package can be built on mips*.
2. File a removal request for the binaries uploaded by John

The remainder of this mail addresses some questions asked by John in response to statements from James Cowgill

> > I was under the impression that the golang maintainers want all architectures bootstrapped from gccgo? This was the reason mips64el support was not in
> > stretch despite upstream support for it. If a normal bootstrap would have been acceptable, I would have done it ages ago.
>
> Why? What difference does it make? If a different bootstrapping compiler
> results in a different golang compiler after a second rebuild, there is
> something wrong with the compiler anyway.
Self-bootstrapping compilers create a maintenance burden. When things go wrong they sometimes can't be fixed through source package changes alone. Porterboxes are also of limited utility because you can't install non-archive packages on them. Then there are derivatives to consider, if a self-bootstrapping compiler gets broken in a derivative that rebuilds everything then finding someone who can un-jam it can be a pain.

Whether to take on that burden should be a decision for the maintainers of the package, not for some flyby contributer.

> > Please can you actually discuss this with the package maintainers and mips porters _before_ you do anything like this again. You should also read the mips
> > related go bugs filed against various golang packages.
>
> Odd. Last time I did this for fpc [1], you were actually very happy. Now
> you're getting upset despite the only changes actually necessary are
> two lines changed in debian/control.in and debian/helpers/goenv.sh.
>
> What's the difference now?

We are happy that you are working on getting packages ported to your architecture.

What we are not happy about is how you are doing it. You need to ensure that source goes to the archive either before or at the same time as the binaries and you need to either coordinate with maintainers or (if the maintainers are unresponsive) follow the normal NMU guidelines.


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