Re: Bug#995614: guile-3.0: Please build with --without-threads on alpha to fix FTBFS

Hello Rob!

On 10/8/21 02:56, Rob Browning wrote:
> I've checked with upstream, and while they were not certain that
> changing the --with-threads setting still breaks the library API, they
> thought it probably did, which I believe means we have to assume that it
> does (or could in the future), i.e. upstream makes no guarantees that
> you can ever change that option without breaking the ABI.
> 
> Given that, I think we may have at least these constraints:
> 
>   - For any guile X.Y version (for a given arch) that's in a stable
>     distribution (buster, bullseye, etc.) we cannot change the setting
>     because it would break the contract and could crash existing debian
>     and non-debian applications linked to the relevant guile-X.Y-libs.

The alpha architecture is not part of any distribution which is why this
argument is moot. I was not asking for this option to be set to an release
architecture.

Also, *if* we break the ABI, we can just rebuild all affected packages. We
do that with binNMUs for various reverse dependencies all the time.

Finally, without this change, guile will not work on alpha at all. So, we
cannot break the ABI in the first place, because we didn't have a properly
working guile package on alpha yet.

Thanks,
Adrian