Thoughts on making Thunderbird ExclusiveArch x86_64 in EPEL7?

[Adam Miller]

Hello all,
    I was recently asked on irc if I knew what we going on with
Thunderbird in EPEL7 and I hadn't looked at it in a while but it looks
like the latest build failed:

http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=597057

However, it appears that this is because the version of nss-static
(nss-devel) on PPC64 is too old to build the latest version of
Thunderbird. This appears to still be the case today after more than 2
weeks after the update hit the RHEL7 x86_64 repos. I don't know why
RHEL on PPC64 is lacking this but I'm of the opinion that we could at
least in the mean time build an ExclusiveArch version of the latest
(31.3.0) Thunderbird for x86_64 and if/when PPC64 catches up then
there could be a bump in the spec file and a build for that arch as
well.

I'm not the maintainer or even one of the co-maintainers of
Thunderbird so I don't have a whole lot of skin in the game but I did
want to bring the discussion to the group and see what everyone thinks
about it.

NOTE: Since I wasn't sure about who all is subscribed to this list
I've CC'd xhorak since they have done the most recent koji build and
are actually a maintainer of Thunderbird.

Random side-note: I did test that this builds with 'ExclusiveArch: x86_64'
http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=8458856

Looking forward to everyone's feedback,
-AdamM

[Stephen John Smoogen]

On 22 December 2014 at 09:21, Adam Miller <maxamillion(a)fedoraproject.org&gt;
wrote:

>  Hello all,
>      I was recently asked on irc if I knew what we going on with
>  Thunderbird in EPEL7 and I hadn't looked at it in a while but it looks
>  like the latest build failed:
>
>  http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=597057
>
>  However, it appears that this is because the version of nss-static
>  (nss-devel) on PPC64 is too old to build the latest version of
>  Thunderbird. This appears to still be the case today after more than 2
>  weeks after the update hit the RHEL7 x86_64 repos. I don't know why
>  RHEL on PPC64 is lacking this but I'm of the opinion that we could at
>  least in the mean time build an ExclusiveArch version of the latest
>  (31.3.0) Thunderbird for x86_64 and if/when PPC64 catches up then
>  there could be a bump in the spec file and a build for that arch as
>  well.
>
>  
Thanks for finding this. I agree with this for several reasons:

1) PPC isn't a high use platform.
2) Current PPC (non-le) are not really desktop oriented hardware but server
only hardware. Thunderbird on PPC (and many desktop applications) on PPC do
not make a lot of sense unless someone is actively using PPC and taking
care of those packages.


-- 
Stephen J Smoogen.

[Dmitry Butskoy]

Adam Miller wrote:
>  Random side-note: I did test that this builds with 'ExclusiveArch: x86_64'
>  http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=8458856 
Seamonkey (former Mozilla suite) now build for i686/x86_64 only 
(fedora/epel6), because of random issues on other arches, which cannot 
be resolved due to missing testers. Seamonkey actually shares source 
code with thunderbird (99,9%).

Consider just as a precedent.


Regards,
Dmitry Butskoy