launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Barry Warsaw <barry@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Oct 03, 2014, at 02:42 PM, Colin Watson wrote:

>Launchpad only lets us set this when initialising a new series, so we're
>coming close to a decision point.  What would people think about
>switching this to amd64 when we initialise the 15.04 series?

I'm in favor of it in general.  I think this will also more closely align with
how I do local testing of packages before uploading.  As many of the packages
I touch are arch-indep and my local machine is amd64, I usually end up
building and testing in that environment.  Yeah, I probably should have used
i386 chroots, but it almost never makes a difference and it's more convenient
to use amd64.

I have been bitten by this once or twice though.  An example is system-image
which originally had a hashing algorithm that unknowingly required 64 bits.
At the time I didn't have an appropriate test case for this and it sneaked
through to the touch image, where it broke on 32 bit ARM.  Once the issue was
identified, it was easy enough to rework the hash algorithm to be 32 bit
friendly, and of course add a test.  Now for that package I'm careful to run
the builds and adt-run on 32 bit chroots.

I don't suspect it's possible to accommodate that by setting a flag or
d/control header or some such.  Or maybe an arch restriction in the DEP-8
control file for post-build testing?

Cheers,
-Barry