Re: Bug#864144: e2fsprogs strangeness about mips* multilibs

James Cowgill <[email protected]> Sun, 4 Jun 2017 21:29:17 +0100

Newsgroups	gmane.linux.debian.ports.mips
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Hi,

On 04/06/17 20:51, Helmut Grohne wrote:
> Hi Ted,
> 
> On Sun, Jun 04, 2017 at 02:46:08PM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
>> I'm going to confess complete ignorance to what's going on with mips.
>> In the past my modus operandi is that I would make changes in response
>> to requests to the MIPS porters, in some cases with incomplete
>> understand why they were needed in the first place.
>>
>> My bias would be to remove *all* of the mips specific exceptions in
>> the debian directory, and then see if things still build on mips, and
>> if there are any known problems caused by the mips installer or mips
>> bootpath.  And if we do need to add back any exceptions for the MIPS
>> architecture, let's make sure it's very clearly documented why they
>> are there.  Because at the moment, I'm a bit embarassed at my
>> inability to answer your perfectly reasonable questions.  :-)
> 
> I think the approach is reasonable. I did put
> [email protected] into X-Debbugs-Cc for this reason and am
> full quoting your reply to that list now to have them object.

From what I can tell, the only purpose of the extra mips libraries is to
support some old bootloaders/firmware - arcboot being the only package I
know which used this. No "normal" packages in the archive would have
been able to use them unless they were statically linked. Since arcboot
was removed, I think it should be safe to remove these special libraries
from e2fsprogs.

Thanks,
James

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