On Wed, Jan 15, 2003 at 04:43:36AM -0500, Steven G. Johnson wrote: > I'm cc'ing this to debian-policy, because the issue in the subject line > seems like an important general question. > > To summarize (http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=176627): I > reported a bug for mingw32 (a Linux->Windows cross-compiler) because the > developer had declared it architecture-dependent for no technical reason > that I could understand, and I wanted to run it on Debian/powerpc. > > He (Ron Lee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>) responded: > > Well.. spirit or none there are such things as unsupported architectures. > > > > That said though, you are quite correct in that there should be no > > technical reasons why it should remain that way for this package. > > From a practical point of view though, this is unlikely to change > > in the near future unless you either: > > > > a) do the work. > > b) find someone else with the right hardware prepared to do the work. > > c) buy me a fast new PPC laptop. > > > > I can quite sympathise with what you want, but I'm not going to > > make this package arch-any just so it can break on every arch > > except i386 (and hence keep it out of testing for everyone).
This is an incorrect assumption. If the package does not build on other architectures, then it will *not* be kept out of testing. That will only happen if it built once on some architecture and then stops being buildable. Declaring "Architecture: i386" because you haven't guaranteed yourself that it will build is wrong, and Debian porters have been fighting against this for years. > > That's not the sort of equality we're aiming for. > > Actually, I thought that *was* the sort of equality Debian was aiming > for...if it breaks for any architecture, it's a serious problem that > everyone has to deal with. If every Debian developer refused to support > architectures he/she didn't have immediate access to, non-x86 Debian would > disappear pretty quickly. Precisely. > The main problem with mingw32 and mingw32-runtime, of course, is the > circular dependency. I understand the reason for this, but to get things > up and running I just manually unpacked the mingw32-runtime i386 package > and copied the files onto my system, deleted the dependencies from > debian/control, built & installed mingw32, re-built mingw32-runtime, > deleted the copied runtime, then installed the runtime .deb. Porters would likely have to do something like this by hand for all architectures, but that's not insurmountable; it had to be done for Ada a while back. Cheers, -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
