Re: [PATCH v2] Re-enable riscv64-debian-cross-container (debian riscv64 is finally usable again!)

[Daniel P . Berrangé]

On Fri, May 03, 2024 at 09:07:34AM +0100, Daniel P. Berrangé wrote:
> On Fri, May 03, 2024 at 10:16:34AM +0300, Michael Tokarev wrote:
> > Revert "gitlab-ci: Disable the riscv64-debian-cross-container by default"
> > This reverts commit f51f90c65ed7706c3c4f7a889ce3d6b7ab75ef6a.
> > 
> > riscv64 in debian has been non-functioning for almost a year, after the
> > architecture has been promoted to release architecture and all binary
> > packages started to be re-built, making the port not 
> > multi-arch-co-installable
> > for a long time (in debian, multi-arch packages must be of the same version,
> > but when a package is rebuilt on one architecture it gets a version bump 
> > too).
> > Later on, debiah had a long time64_t transition which made sid unusable for
> > quite some time too.  Both such events happens in debian very rarely (like,
> > once in 10 years or so - for example, previous big transition like that was
> > libc5 => libc6 transition).  Now both of these are finished (where qemu is
> > concerned anyway).
> > 
> > Hopefully debian unstable wont be very unstable.  At the very least it is
> > better to have sporadic CI failures here than no riscv64 coverage at all.
> 
> IME of running Debian sid in CI pipelines for libvirt, it is
> way too unstable to be used as a gating job. There are periods
> weeks-long when packages fail to install, even for relatively
> mainstream arch targets like x86, let alone a new target like
> riscv.

BTW, I don't mean this to be a criticism of Debian. We've seen
the same kind of instability with all the other non-released distros
(Fedora Rawhide, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and Alpine Edge) in libvirt CI,
such that we've finally set all of them non-gating across all our CI
deployments.

They're all good to have in CI as a smoke test to identify possible
problems coming towards you in the next stable release, but false
failures have to be expected.

With regards,
Daniel
-- 
|: https://berrange.com      -o-    https://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange :|
|: https://libvirt.org         -o-            https://fstop138.berrange.com :|
|: https://entangle-photo.org    -o-    https://www.instagram.com/dberrange :|