bug#54864: GNU Cuirass reports arm64 as armhf

[Bengt Richter <bokr@bokr.com>]

Hi Christopher,

Tl;dr: [Meta-Reply]

I think IWBN if a busy volunteer like yourself could add
a cookie in an email like yours that would automatically
provide a "heads-up" to readers of the documentation you
intend to patch.

The idea is that emails could be automatically scanned for
such cookies/markup, e.g. maybe "[Pending-Patch]", next to
an URL for the doc in question, which URL could then simply
be appended to a log file of such urls, (maybe together with
date and author from the email header).

People could manually grep it if reading a document that
is confusing, to check if an update is on the way, for starters.

But if it's a good idea, then I would hope document reading
tools would start to make automatic use of it, maybe starting
with a notice like "Heads Up: [Pending-Patch]" when opening the doc or
section of the doc.

It could grow features as people came up with new and better ideas,
but I think there are developers here that could prototype something
useful in an evening :)

Thus, given that you took the time to write your email, it would not have
been much extra trouble adding the cookie so your text below would look like e.g.,

    ([Pending-Patch] https://guix.gnu.org/cuirass/manual/cuirass.html#Specifications)

(IIUC that's the doc you intend to patch) :)

HTH in some way.
Better ideas? I don't mind :)

On +2022-04-11 17:55:41 -0400, Christopher Rodriguez wrote:
> Reporting this from my local installs of GNU Cuirass, though a cursory glance at
> ci.guix.gnu.org (likely) shows the same issue:
> 
> GNU Cuirass currently reports both `armhf-linux` and `arm64-linux` targets as
> `armhf-linux` on the web interface.
> 
> This is not only incorrect, but potentially confusing to newcomers: I have spent
> some free time in the last week or two (after purchasing an MNT Reform) trying
> to get my home server to build packages for deployment on an ARM-based laptop. I
> only discovered that I was targeting the 32-bit version of ARM after asking on
> IRC (and then looking through the logs:
> https://logs.guix.gnu.org/guix/2022-04-11.log#221203 or thereabouts, where
> vagrantc mentions `armhf` as suffering bitrot and goes on to mention both
> `aarch64` and `arm64` in another sentence).
> 
> This is not helped by the Documentation
> (https://guix.gnu.org/cuirass/manual/cuirass.html#Specifications) not giving any
> examples of supported platforms, highly-search-engine-ranked issues and blog
> posts (https://issues.guix.gnu.org/54055 and
> https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2021/cuirass-10-released/ for instance, both
> front-page google) only mentioning `armhf-linux`, and all running instances of
> GNU Cuirass not even listing `arm64-linux` as an option.
> 
> When I have time (I am out of town for the rest of the week) I will try to
> submit a patch for the documentation to list the available targets. Changing the
> UI is more complex (though wider-reaching) and a bit more out of my
> wheelhouse. Help there would be appreciated.
> 
> --
> 
> Christopher Rodriguez
-- 
Regards,
Bengt Richter