[Soc-coordination] Status Report of Improve Debian Port on Mipsel, Week 5

[Xilin Sun]

Hi,

In the past week, I worked on packages which fail to build from source
or are uninstallable on Debian port on mipsel.

One of the reasons for a package to fail to build from source is due
to incorrect dependency setting in the control file. This is the case
with #752171 pcp: Build depends on autoconf. I have uploaded patch for
#752171.

One of the packages I tried to build in the past weeks is etsf-io,
which fails to build from source (#746839) because of the error: "No
'NetCDF' library found." This bug has appeared more than once (#618168
and #713232). This however is not caused by errors in the control
file, but the change of version of gfortran. While this appears in all
building bots, it successfully builds on my machine. I plan to do
binNMU for it.

A large number of haskell-related packages build successfully but are
uninstallable on the mipsel port. This do not show on the amd64 and
i386 port. The reason for such packages to be uninstallable is that
the package ghc-ghci is not available on MIPS/MIPSEL (and some other
ports like ARM). There do not seem to be an easy fix for this bug, so
the packages which fail to build from source may be removed.

Some other work of last week: I uploaded patch for #746920 wfmath:
ftbfs with GCC-4.9. This bug is similar to the ones I dealt with in
the first two weeks. It is caused by change in symbols support in
GCC-4.9. The fix is done through modifications of "symbols" files. As
they affect Debian ports including MIPSEL, fixing them will lead to
improvement in Debian port on MIPSEL. At the same time, fixing them is
one good practice for me to get more familiar with the whole process
of Debian package maintenance.

In the coming week, I will continue working on fixing packages which
fail to build from source or are uninstallable on mipsel port of
Debian.

Regards,
Xilin