[Pkg-mongodb-maintainers] Bug#848298: mongodb: Build for s390x

[Apollon Oikonomopoulos]

Control: tags -1 wontfix upstream fixed-upstream

Hi Jeremy,

On 19:50 Thu 15 Dec     , Jeremy Bicha wrote:
> MongoDB has recently gained support for running on s390x.
> 
> The official documentation says s390x is supported on MongoDB 3.4
> Enterprise Edition.[1]
> 
> IBM has documentation [2]that says it's possible to build and run it
> on 3.2. They have ~16 backported patches in their git repo branched
> off an older 3.2 version. (I noticed at least one of the patches was
> already applied in a more recent 3.2 release.
> 
> I don't have access to an s390x machine. I just know some people were
> interested in seeing this work on Debian/Ubuntu.

Thanks for the heads-up. Although I'm not completely opposed to the 
idea, there are at least two important reasons I think we should not do 
this for 3.2 (and thus I'm marking it as wontfix, at least for now):

 - The patchset is quite intrusive: it adds support for big-endian 
   architectures *in general* and touches a lot of code also used by 
   little-endian architectures, with unknown impact.

 - The IBM branch is based off 3.2.0 and I suspect it will be 
   non-trivial to forward-port everything to 3.2.11. Furthermore not all 
   IBM patches seem to have been accepted upstream as-is.

Thus said, I prefer to enable s390x support when we upload 3.4, where 
it's officially supported and guaranteed not to interfere with the other 
architectures. Note that I haven't made up my mind yet as to whether we 
should push for 3.4 in Stretch or not; 3.4 it is still very young, while 
3.2 is new-enough and has been tested in production.

Regards,
Apollon