[R-pkg-team] Bug#1037439: Opinions about removal of 32bit architecture for r-cran-rstan (Was: Bug#1037439: r-cran-rstan/armhf FTBFS with r-cran-bh 1.74)

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Nilesh,

Am Thu, Jun 22, 2023 at 10:06:02PM +0530 schrieb Nilesh Patra:
> 1. rstan has got a lot of reverse-build-deps and reverse-deps
> and those reversd-deps have further more of them. rstan is kind of an
> important package in that sense, and dropping 32-bit arch for this would
> mean filing arch specific rm bugs for a lot of R packages, and I'm quite
> un-happy with the amount of noise that it will potentially create.

I'm aware of this since I'm afraid sooner or later we have to go this
step route.
 
> As you may see, the list will get long at some point.
> 
> 2. We recently packages shiny-server, and there are people who would
> like to run it on a single board computer (like rpi). On a quick search
> I even managed to find a blog post about the same[1]. Now, these run on
> debian armhf and armel mostly, therefore having r-packages support it
> would be good.

On the other hand that's a pretty good argument which is perfectly
convincing for me.
 
> 3. Removing this package from 32-bit will increase quite a bit of
> entropy across many cran packages that we have with some of the packages
> supporting 32-bit and a bunch of packages that do not.
> 
> I do not have a very strong opinion for keeping it, and if keeping
> 32-bit support is making your life un-necessarily and extremely hard,
> drop it by all means. But I do think we should consider keeping support
> when it is a possibility.
> I'd have without a second thought agreed to have dropped support for a
> debian-med team package had you asked, since most of those packages are
> leaf packages and supporting 32-bit is irrelevant for most
> bioinformatics cases, but I do not think I could say the same about R.

I confirm it makes perfectly sense to me to keep general R support for
32bit.
 
> Let me know what you think.

I think you have a valid point to apply the patch that might save
32bit support for rstan.

Kind regards
     Andreas.

-- 
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