On Sat, 23 Mar 2019 at 03:49:32 +0100, Andreas Henriksson wrote: > An additional option here which I'd like to propose would be to stop > mucking around with dependencies to try to hide problems on those > architectures. Instead "simply" do arch-specific removal of the broken > packages, including all their reverse dependencies.
I'd prefer this too, and this is what we tried first as a solution to #906016; but it turns out that the GNOME team can't unilaterally do this without help from the release team, the release team don't want to do this without an OK from the d-i team, and the d-i team aren't sure that it won't break the installer on s390x. If someone from the s390(x) porting team tells us "no, we don't expect desktop tasks to work, so it's irrelevant whether they do" then maybe that would convince the release team, but I've been making a point of cc'ing that list on related bugs for a while and not heard anything from them. As a result I've only proposed solutions that the GNOME team could implement ourselves, without external dependencies. > will: > - also automatically be removed from testing Dependencies of task metapackages can't get removed from testing unless the release team apply force (perhaps not even then, I'm not sure). The packages involved in #906016 were uploaded in November, and didn't migrate until after I made task-gnome-desktop installable on s390x in March. I agree that making the full GNOME desktop work on s390x is not actually a useful thing to be doing: there's potentially some value in being able to run individual apps on a headless machine via remote X11, but I don't see any reason why it would be rational to run the full desktop environment on your $15K mainframe. smcv