Bug#812741: neovim: Please don't build-depend on luajit on unsupported architectures

John Paul Adrian Glaubitz glaubitz at physik.fu-berlin.de
Tue Feb 23 09:55:04 UTC 2016


On 02/23/2016 02:43 AM, James McCoy wrote:
>> The moment they start embedding LuaJIT into neovim, the package needs
>> to be patched or it will be removed out of Debian.
> 
> That's a bit of an overreaction.  What I meant was what's typically
> meant when talking of embedding a language[0][1][2] (especially with
> Lua), using the language's functionality from the application.

Well, then we were thinking about different things. Good to know that
they are not talking about embedding the actual library.

>> I still don't see what warrants the requirement of LuaJIT in a text
>> editor which could not replaced by the regular Lua interpretor.
> 
> As I mentioned earlier, LuaC doesn't provide FFI which is something they
> apparently want to use.  Also, one of the major purposes they're looking
> at for using Lua(JIT) is translating VimL to Lua and then executing
> that.  The thought is that using Lua itself instead of LuaJIT would make
> that too slow.  Some more information on what has been under discussion
> can be seen in <https://github.com/neovim/neovim/issues/801>.

Well, they could just always allow Lua as a fallback on architectures
were LuaJIT is not available. Haskell's hslua does the same, why
wouldn't NeoVIM be able to do that?

> Regardless, I don't see why you're having such a strong reaction to
> this.  It's their design choice and just because it limits what
> architectures they'll be able to run on it isn't reason enough to
> consider this a bug.  There are plenty of applications in Debian which
> don't run on all the supported architectures/kernels.

Yes, but that does not mean we should accept that in Debian. Debian
specifically aims to provide a universal distribution which runs
on a large number of different targets and everyone should therefore
help to keep their own packages available on all targets. Especially
when it comes to such mundane things like a text editor.

> Bram took extreme efforts to keep compatibility with arcane and mostly
> unused computers/OSes and that's something the Neovim folks have decided
> not to continue, for better or worse.

So, you would say that ARM64, PPC64EL (POWER8), S390X, MIPS64EL and
SPARC64 [1] are all "arcane" and "mostly unused" architectures?

I find that a bit ignorant, to be honest. 4 of the 5 architectures
I mentioned are currently release architectures and SPARC64 is
currently being worked on to become a release architecture.

There is a world beyond x86, you know :).

Adrian

> [1] https://buildd.debian.org/status/package.php?p=luajit&suite=unstable

-- 
 .''`.  John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
: :' :  Debian Developer - glaubitz at debian.org
`. `'   Freie Universitaet Berlin - glaubitz at physik.fu-berlin.de
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