Bug#1042980: gnome-shell: FTBFS on mips64el, mipsel: perf-* tests fail

[Simon McVittie]

Source: gnome-shell
Version: 44.3-1
Severity: serious
Tags: ftbfs experimental help
Justification: fails to build from source (but built successfully in the past)
X-Debbugs-Cc: debian-mips at lists.debian.org
User: debian-mips at lists.debian.org
Usertags: mips64el mipsel

gnome-shell 44 builds successfully on all release architectures except
mips*el, but fails to build on mips*el. The three perf-* unit tests fail
with exit status 1 and no obvious error messages:
<https://buildd.debian.org/status/fetch.php?pkg=gnome-shell&arch=mips64el&ver=44.3-1&stamp=1688819000&raw=0>
<https://buildd.debian.org/status/fetch.php?pkg=gnome-shell&arch=mipsel&ver=44.3-1&stamp=1688798824&raw=0>

At the moment this is only in experimental, but we want to upload it to
unstable soon, as part of the libmutter-12-0 transition
<https://release.debian.org/transitions/html/auto-mutter.html>.

Is gnome-shell practically useful on mips-based hardware, or does it
have hardware requirements that the mips family do not meet in practice?
If nobody really uses it on mips*el, it might be better to do
architecture-specific removals rather than attempting to debug and fix it.

Or, if the mips porting team can confirm that GNOME 43 works in practice
as a desktop environment on mips*el hardware, then it would be useful
to try GNOME 44 from experimental on the same hardware (after building
gnome-shell locally with DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=nocheck) to check whether
this is a practical problem.

Thanks,
    smcv