linaro-release team mailing list archive

[Steve Langasek <steve.langasek@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Jamie,

On Fri, Apr 08, 2011 at 10:14:54PM -0000, Jamie Strandboge wrote:
> To me, this is a pretty big change less than three weeks to release. I
> appreciate the hard work that went into examining potential breakage and
> on the surface things seem generally ok and workable, but considering
> how part 1 of the mutliarch changes went, I have some concerns (not
> being critical here, just that these are rather fundamental changes we
> are discussing and I think that is worth some pause).

Yes, I recognize the cause for your concern and understand completely where
you're coming from.  If this is considered too high-risk, it's not the end
of the world if we don't include this change - it would make it easier for
progress to be made on multiarch between now an oneiric opening, but it's
not critical.

I think if anything else did turn up that broke because of this change, it
would be less effort to fix that than it would to maintain an out-of-archive
linux package.  And there's definitely much less risk here than with the
earlier change, because software has much less reason to probe paths to
asm/*.h than to probe paths for libraries.

> Could something not be coordinated with Lucas?  I thought archive rebuilds
> for him were in the neighborhood of 8 hours (that is total hearsay-- I
> don't actually know).

That's a good idea; I've pinged him on IRC, hopefully he'll get back to me
soon.

If we can get a rebuild scheduled and I can commit to addressing any new
build failures that turn up as a result, are you happy for this change to go
forward in the meantime?  If not, I think we should forgo this entirely for
natty due to the timing.

> @Steve, In all honesty, I have a hard time imagining you letting this
> change through if you were release manager. :P

I would be asking all the same questions if the tables were turned, but the
thing about being the developer proposing a change is that it changes your
perspective in ways that are difficult to filter out, which is why members
of the release team also use the FFe process. :)

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek@xxxxxxxxxx                                     vorlon@xxxxxxxxxx

-- 
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Linaro
Release Team, which is a direct subscriber.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/750585

Title:
  [FFe] support for making linux-libc-dev coinstallable under multiarch

Status in “linux” package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Committed
Status in “linux” source package in Natty:
  Fix Committed
Status in “linux” source package in Oneiric:
  Fix Committed

Bug description:
  FFe justification: now that multiarch support for runtime libraries in
  the base system is available in the archive, the next step in this
  process is multiarch coinstallability of -dev packages.  Although most
  of the remaining work on multiarch -dev can and will take place in ppa
  for natty given where we are in the release cycle, any -dev package
  tree has at its root linux-libc-dev which is built from the 'linux'
  source package - the package which is updated more frequently than any
  other by SRU.  Rather than trying to keep up with SRUs, or
  artificially inflating the version of a linux-libc-dev-only package
  build in ppa, it would be welcome if a multiarch-ready linux-libc-dev
  could be included in the archive for natty.

  Risks: anything that looks directly in /usr/include/asm for headers
  will have problems with this change; anything that uses the system
  include path from the compiler will not.  My best efforts at examining
  the archive for this issue (see below for details) have turned up only
  four packages in main and universe that are affected: three C library
  implementations, and bash-completion.  Updating these packages in
  concert is manageable (patch for eglibc is ready, patches for the
  others are in preparation), but there's always some risk that the text
  search on package sources has missed something, and there wouldn't be
  room for another full archive rebuild before release to catch other
  breakage.

  
  Details:
  In order to have coinstallable multiarch -dev packages of any sort, linux-libc-dev first needs to be coinstallable since libc-dev depends on it.  This seems to be straightforward to achieve; only the asm directory needs to be moved to the multiarch directory path, all the other header files appear to be (sensibly) architecture-neutral and can be shared between architectures.

  The compiler will find /usr/include/<triplet>/asm for the
  corresponding architecture with no problems; I've done a number of
  test builds that work just fine this way.  The only trouble is with
  software that walks the filesystem looking for asm/<foo>.h includes
  instead of trusting the compiler to resolve them.  It's unlikely that
  software should need to do this since the asm headers should as a rule
  not be directly included from userspace anyway, but the chances are
  not zero. I didn't expect nearly as many packages to break as did by
  the move to /usr/lib/<triplet>, either, so it seems my faith in the
  sanity of upstream build systems is generally misplaced.  And I don't
  think we have time to discover any resulting issues with another
  archive test rebuild and fix the resulting packages before the natty
  release.