Removing armel from the list of arches we build for

[Hector Oron]

Hello,

2013/8/21 Joey Hess <joeyh at debian.org>:
> Gustavo Noronha Silva wrote:

>> armel has been one of the sore points of maintaining WebKit in Debian.
>> It often fails to build the package because of lack of memory or disk
>> space. I'm told by my colleague Hector Oron that WebKit's utility for
>> armel is quite limited, given it's often used headless rather than
>> providing a graphical user interface of some kind.

> Sounds like the same kind of "surely noone uses this" rationalization we
> always see when going back to see why some package we use got removed
> from Debian.

The fundamental cause for the build failure seems to be memory
limitation, while webkit requires all the available RAM in buildd
(1.5GB), is uses all the SWAP (3GB) and final linking stage explodes
only after 3d 14h 13m or so [1]... we could still try to make swap
bigger and re-try the build, but certainly we are reaching buildd
hardware limit here. This is not the lame excuse of "surely noone uses
this" rationalization we always see because someone does not feel like
wasting time on fixing a bug on non his preferred architecture.

However, more powerful hardware is now commercially available, Debian
recently got donated 3 nodes on Calxeda servers with Quad core
Cortex-A9 with 4GB of RAM, however those were planned to be used for
armhf port (maybe as two buildds and one porterbox), and current
infrastructure does not easily allow to special case package builds
per buildd.

Having said the above, we are still working on trying to fix the build
of webkitgtk/armel, but no promises here.

2013/8/21 peter green <plugwash at p10link.net>:
> The bigger question IMO though is how many reverse dependencies does the
> variant of webkit built by the "webkit" source package (which is only one of
> several webkit variants in debian) have and how strong are those reverse
> dependencies.

libwebkitgtk-3.0-0
Reverse Depends:
  zenity
  yelp
  libyelp0
  xiphos
  libwebkitgtk-3.0-dev
  libwebkitgtk-3.0-0-dbg
  gir1.2-webkit-3.0
  gir1.2-javascriptcoregtk-3.0
  shotwell
  sflphone-gnome
  librhythmbox-core6
  gtkpod
  libgtk-3-0
  gnome-sushi
  libgoa-1.0-0
  evolution-rss
  epiphany-extensions
  epiphany-browser
  nautilus-sendto-empathy
  empathy
  dwb
  libdevhelp-3-0
  devhelp
  cairo-dock-weblets-plug-in
  anjuta

libwebkitgtk-1.0-0
Reverse Depends:
  xxxterm
  xtrkcad
  webkit2pdf
  libwebkit1.1-cil
  webkit-image-gtk
  libwebkitgtk-dev
  libwebkitgtk-1.0-0-dbg
  gir1.2-webkit-1.0
  gir1.2-javascriptcoregtk-1.0
  uzbl
  surf
  python-webkit
  python-jswebkit
  osmo
  miro
  midori
  maildir-utils-extra
  luakit
  liferea
  libproxy0
  lekhonee-gnome
  libghc-webkit-dev
  gphpedit
  gnucash
  gmpc-plugins
  gimp
  geany-plugin-webhelper
  claws-mail-fancy-plugin
  bibledit-gtk
  banshee
  claws-mail-fancy-plugin

Cheers,

[1] https://buildd.debian.org/status/logs.php?pkg=webkitgtk&arch=armel
-- 
 Héctor Orón  -.. . -... .. .- -.   -.. . ...- . .-.. --- .--. . .-.