[Pkg-grass-devel] Processing of grass_6.0.0-1_alpha.changes

[Steve Halasz]

On Fri, 2005-03-11 at 13:00 +1300, Hamish wrote:
> On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 17:43:31 -0500
> Archive Administrator <katie@ftp-master.debian.org> wrote:
> 
> > grass_6.0.0-1_alpha.changes uploaded successfully to localhost
> > along with the files:
> >   grass_6.0.0-1.dsc
> >   grass_6.0.0.orig.tar.gz
> >   grass_6.0.0-1.diff.gz
> >   grass_6.0.0-1_alpha.deb
> >   grass-doc_6.0.0-1_all.deb
> >   libgrass_6.0.0-1_alpha.deb
> >   libgrass-dev_6.0.0-1_alpha.deb
> > 
> > Greetings,
> > 
> > 	Your Debian queue daemon
> 
> 
> I am just curious why it only produces alpha, i386, and mips binaries?
> 
> Is it to lighten the load on the Sarge release cycle or a
> misconfiguration? (or both?)
> 
> ARM would be nice for the GIS on handhelds folks collecting field data.

There is an entry in the Packages-arch-specific file[1] that tells the
build system to only build grass for i386. I'm not sure why it was put
in there to begin with. The comment suggests that it was statically
linked and the huge size of the resulting binaries may have caused
problems with the other arch's buildds. Or just taken up too much space
on the mirrors.

Alpha gets built because my mentor builds his uploads on that arch. I'm
not sure why mips ever got built, but now my mentor needs to build it
manually each time so that grass can migrate to testing.

I've tried a number of times to get the grass entry removed from
packages-arch-specific, but I haven't gotten any acknowledgment from the
appropriate people. If there's a reason they're leaving it there, they
haven't told me what it is. I've tried asking for advice on
debian-devel, but that wasn't particularly fruitful. Beyond trying to
hack in and change the file myself I'm not sure what to try next. Maybe
I could start another flamewar about uncommunicative cabals in
debian ;-)

Steve

[1] http://buildd.debian.org/quinn-diff/Packages-arch-specific