Control: tag -1 moreinfo
Hi!
On Mon, 2023-01-09 at 15:20:41 +0100, Helge Deller wrote:
> Package: dpkg
> Severity: important
> Tags: lfs, hppa
> Version: 1.21.17
> Tags: hppa, patch, ftbfs
> This is a follow-up for #1020335 regarding "enabling LFS by default
> on hppa arch".
>
> It's unfeasable to try to fix every package which fails on
> hppa due to missing large file support. The problem is, that failures
> happen undeterministic and silently at runtime which makes it often
> really hard to find the real cause and in summary wastes a lot of
> developer time.
Sorry I didn't answer before, I got entangled doing the final changes
for the toolchain freeze.
First of all, I do understand your position here, and the desire to
leave behind any problems related with LFS. As I think I've mentioned
before, I'd love if we could do that globally, but unfortunately I
don't think that's feasible :/ (but perhaps I'm wrong about it!).
Said that, I'm still rather uncomfortable with this request, even if
it's now at least limited to an hppa-only change.
The potential reach of the ABI breakage seems to me like an unknown
that has not been evaluated in depth. And I understand that you
mentioned that as port maintainers you don't see such ABI breakage as
a big issue, but still.
> The attached patch is trivial and enables LFS by default for the hppa
> arch only. Guillem, would you mind applying the attached patch?
I've been pondering over this, and my concerns are:
* unknown amount of potential ABI breakage (this would also be
interesting to know to evaluate similar potential switches on
other 32-bit arches).
* how to communicate this potential breakage to hppa users.
* whether that breakage might cause users to report bugs against
packagers, whose maintainers cannot do much about, or that might
end up on dpkg for incurring that breakage.
* whether the change might break hppa builds (unknown amount too?)
that might need changes to source packages.
* need to inform all maintainers about the potential breakage.
* all the above compounded with the current ongoing freeze.
* this ABI breaking change, potentially being used as precedent for
other similar ABI change proposals, breaking ABI port stability
guarantees.
Given the above, I think I'd like have more information on the table,
and I'm not sure how urgent you see this change, but I think right now
during the freeze is probably not the right time to entertain?
I think some of the information I might like to see, might perhaps be
a tall ask, but I think it would be very useful for hppa and for other
ports as well. And in the end I think given that this would also
probably end up having a global impact on maintainers, it might be
worth bringing it up on debian-devel, once there's a more clear
picture?
Does the above seem reasonable?
Thanks,
Guillem
