On Tue, 24 Feb 2004, Toshio wrote:
> Point of order here. We do actually try our best to make sure
that every
> SRPM which leaves the building can recompile successfully. From time to
> time, we hit a particularily difficult package (OpenOffice for a little
> while) which won't recompile, but we work to fix those issues (and
> OpenOffice nows compiles again.)
If I understand this thread correctly, we have one person asking whether
it's a bug that certain arches are being specifically excluded from
being targetted. Other people are answering that the potential gain is
so small no one is going to put effort into it.
Exactly.
So far I don't see that there's a big conflict in the two
views. It
_would_ take a little effort to remove the exclusions from the spec
files, true. But if it is intended that SRPMs will recompile
successfully outside of Redhat and there's no good reason an arch is
disallowed then it seems like it's a (low priority) bug to me.
I disagree. It would take me personally about 15 minutes to make
the changes in CVS to all of the relevant packages, and then a
small amount of time beyond that to submit the new packages to
beehive for building. Assuming nothing fails, it is a very
trivial amount of work. In fact, it would have been completed
since my last email except I do not modify other people's
packages without asking them for permission first, so I sent an
email directly to each affected package owner rather than
commiting fixes myself.
A few packages have since been fixed by their owners, more will
likely follow.
If someone who actually cares about the (possibly psychological)
gains they can get by devoting their time to testing and
submitting patches to build targetting other arches, doesn't it
benefit everyone to apply those patches? Are we talking about
reviewing three line patches here, or fifty?
Not even. It's a one line change to the spec file in every one
of the packages listed. 2 of the packages are architecture
specific to non-x86, one is ia64-only, the other s390-only, the
rest are cross architecture, and just had an incorrect
Exclusivearch line, just as I suspected originally.
It is interesting though how a pointless debate about the merits
of recompiling for athlon came out of this, since while it is
true that recompiling for athlon doesn't buy you anything - that
is totally aside from the fact that these packages contained an
unintentional bug in their Exclusivearch lines. ;o)
The problem should disappear within the next week likely as
packages get updated. In the future, if someone detects a
problem like this, it's best to file it in bugzilla along with a
brief note to use %{ix86} instead of i386/i686 in Exclusivearch
or Excludearch tags.
Take care,
TTYL
--
Mike A. Harris
ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat