Re: libarchive fails tests on i686

[Ricardo Wurmus <ricardo.wurmus@mdc-berlin.de>]

Andreas Enge writes:

> On Thu, Mar 05, 2015 at 10:47:53AM +0100, Ricardo Wurmus wrote:
>> libarchive has not yet been built for i686 on hydra, so there are no
>> binary substitutes available.  The failure to build libarchive blocks
>> other packages such as qt.
>
> It is a bit strange that we should depend on bsdtar and bsdcpio... Well,
> probably it is the library libarchive. The dependency comes in through
> cmake (and is actually not detected by "guix refresh -l libarchive").
>
> In linuxfromscratch, libarchive is only mentioned as "recommended" to build
> cmake:
>    http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/view/svn/general/cmake.html
> So maybe we could take it out from the cmake inputs?

I do not know enough about this to decide either way.

> Or maybe we should build libarchive with the configure flags
>   --disable-bsdtar --disable-bsdcpio
> (and then the tests would not be run...); after all, we have gnu tar and
> gnu cpio.

I haven't yet looked more closely at what the tests are trying to
establish.  Are you suggesting that the tests fail because GNU tar
behaves differently?

> What do you think?

I would like to understand the test failure better, but on the other
side this failure blocks a considerable number of packages motivating me
to get rid of the problem.  I don't know what side effects the above
configure flags would have.  Could we just disable these tests for now?

~~ Ricardo