[Debian-med-packaging] Please add force hint to enable metaphlan2-data testing migration

[Emilio Pozuelo Monfort]

On 04/11/16 09:39, Andreas Tille wrote:
> Hi Emilio,
> 
> On Fri, Nov 04, 2016 at 09:21:56AM +0100, Emilio Pozuelo Monfort wrote:
>>>
>>> Hmmm, I'm afraid I do not understand what you mean.  What exactly is the
>>> big hammer and how can I prevent asking you to use it?
>>
>> The big hammer is a force-hint type hint, which basically tells britney 'ignore
>> everything with this package and migrate it to testing, no matter what'.
> 
> OK, that's really nasty.
>  
>> There are two ways to improve this:
>>
>> - try not to get these packages auto-removed from testing
> 
> Neither sspace nor metaphlan2-data were in testing at all.  These are new
> packages that never have made it into testing at all.  So it seems that my
> assumption that once the package is in testing (and I fully agree that its
> our task to keep them there) no additional force-hint will be required.

sspace was in testing, then got removed, see
https://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sspace.html

And yes, I think once the package is in testing, no force-hints are needed.

>> - make bowtie/bowtie2 32-bit friendly
>>
>> I imagine the latter is a difficult task or it would have happened already. But
>> it would be the right solution to this problem, and a good outcome for bowtie
>> and its rdeps as well imho.
> 
> I fully agree and you are right we just did so.
> 
> When thinking about more solution: Is it really sensible these days to
> pin the testing migration on the existence of packages in i386?  I might
> be very naive about the mechanism behind but I think at least some
> "i386||amd64" logic would be appropriate.

Not really. That's there to catch regressions and bugs, and should stay for the
foreseeable future (as long as i386 stays mainstream). I won't remove that for a
dozen of packages that are not installable on i386.

Cheers,
Emilio