[Pkg-ganeti-devel] Bug#779772: ganeti: Does not compile on armel

[Apollon Oikonomopoulos]

Control: tags -1 wontfix
Control: severity -1 wishlist

Hi,

On 18:49 Wed 04 Mar     , Juraj Holtak wrote:
> I have tried to install ganeti on armel arch and found ganeti-htools
> and ganeti-haskell packages missing in the apt repos. So I decided to
> compile from the source package. First problem is that there is an 
> unresolved dependency to ghc-ghci. After using the -d option to ignore 
> the missing dependency (as haskell interpreter is installed), 
> the build process stops at
> 
> recipe for target 'src/Ganeti/THH/PyType.o' failed
> 
> I couldn`t make up any more meaningful error messages.
> 
> Please take a look at ther arch builds as they seam to be also broken because
> many other archs are also missing.

TL;DR: ganeti won't build on architectures other than x86 and PowerPC  
       with GHC 7.6 because of missing GHC features on those 
       architectures. It might build with 7.8 from experimental, but I 
       haven't tested that yet.

So, this is actually not a ganeti bug. Ganeti uses a Haskell 
meta-programming facility called `Template Haskell' (hence the `THH' you 
see in the path above). Unfortunately, Template Haskell is only 
available on specific architectures and requires a functional GHC 
interpreter, that's what the dependency on ghc-ghci is there for.  

ghc-ghci is a virtual package, provided by `ghc' only on architectures 
properly supporting runtime linking. For GHC 7.6 in unstable this 
includes x86, amd64 and PowerPC.  For in-depth information on THH, GHCi 
etc. on ARM see [1]. So, in this respect the build for these 
architectures is not broken, it's just missing build-dependencies that 
are there on purpose and there's nothing we can currently do about it.

Apart from that, I seriously doubt the usability of Ganeti on non-x86 
architectures. Xen will not work for sure. Qemu will work but Ganeti 
assumes a PC architecture for all guests, which will not be native to 
the host, so it will be unbearably slow. The only usable hypervisor will 
probably be LXC, but that's rather experimental in Ganeti. Still, I 
haven't restricted Ganeti to a set of architectures just in case someone 
can do something useful on any arch Ganeti happens to build.

Regards,
Apollon

[1] https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2013-December/111825.html
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