[Pkg-iscsi-maintainers] Bug#784092: open-iscsi: udebs for some archs completely empty

[Christian Seiler]

Package: open-iscsi
Version: 2.0.873+git0.3b4b4500-8

(I'm reporting this to keep track of the issue. I've found this by
chance while improving the packaging.)

udebs are currently only built for select architectures. Unfortunately,
there are two separate lists that have gotten out of sync.

The first list is in debian/control and tells Debian's build tools for
which architectures the udeb should be built at all. The list of
architectures there is:

amd64 arm64 i386 ia64 mips mipsel powerpc s390x ppc64el ppc64 armhf

The second list is in debian/rules. It is used to make the
determination whether to populate the udeb or not. That list only
contains the following architectures:

amd64 arm64 i386 ia64 mips mipsel powerpc

This means that for the following 4 architectures the udeb is built but
never populated during build: s390x ppc64el ppc64 armhf

You can see that if you look at the package sizes for different
architectures:
https://packages.debian.org/unstable/open-iscsi-udeb
Most udebs are a few 100 K large, on those 4 archictectures they are
less than 1 K large (which is probably just useless metadata).

@Ritesh:

I've already fixed this in my local packaging (will push to git on
alioth soon), where I have gotten rid of the separate list in
debian/rules (making it impossible for the bug to resurface), but two
questions remain for me:

 1. I think we should ask the release team to make a stable update for
    Jessie's first point release, because this is really bad. The
    installer won't be able to provide iSCSI on those 4 architectures
    at all.

    If you agree, we should do an upload to unstable first with my
    packaging changes that also fix the bug (we need to fix it in
    unstable first before a PU will be accepted) and then prepare a
    targeted fix for Jessie (by just adding the missing archs to
    debian/rules). Normally I would not have suggested an unstable
    upload so soon already (I would have liked to have more changes in
    git beforehand), but this bug seems rather nasty to me.

    So if you are onboard, I'll run gbp dch on just my packaging
    changes so far in unstable so that a finished -9 package is in git.
    You can then do an unstable upload, I'll prepare a targeted upload
    for Jessie, push that into git, ask the release team for approval
    (which my guess is they'll grant for this type of bug) and then you
    could upload the specifically fixed version to jessie-p-u.

 2. Is there a reason why the udeb is not Architecture: any instead of
    the specific ones? I mean, the binaries are the same ones as in the
    normal deb package (no separate build), so I don't see why one
    needs this in the first place? Is this perhaps a relic from the
    time where the package still built kernel modules?

    Because I'd really like to get rid of the specific architecture
    list in general, that will reduce the maintenance burden in the
    long run - so ideally I'd change that to any or linux-any or so.

Thoughts?

Christian