Bug 395769 – sys-apps/pciutils: Mask request on multiple architectures

• Product: Gentoo/Alt
• Status: RESOLVED FIXED

[Description Richard Yao (RETIRED) 2011-12-23 06:27:23 UTC]

sys-apps/pciutils should be masked on the following architectures:

sparc-solaris
sparc64-solaris
ppc-macos
x86-macos
x64-macos

I have confirmed build failures on sparc64-solaris and x64-macos and looked into the causes of the failures. In its present form, pciutils relies on a x86-specific hack to access PCI information on Solaris and none of the methods it has for accessing PCI information appear to exist on Mac OS X.

As a side note, it might work on the following from what upstream claims, but I am unable to check:

ppc-aix
x86-solaris
x64-solaris
x64-freebsd
x86-netbsd
x86-openbsd
x64-openbsd
ppc-openbsd

http://mj.ucw.cz/pciutils.html

[Comment 1 Fabian Groffen 2011-12-29 20:48:04 UTC]

Isn't it being masked by "missing keyword", already sufficient to say that this isn't working?

[Comment 2 Richard Yao (RETIRED) 2011-12-30 00:10:06 UTC]

The missing keyword mask is ambiguous in that it can mean either that a package hasn't been tested for anyone to know that it works or using it is not supported. An explicit mask is quite clear in stating that this package has known problems.

Experienced users know that many of the unkeyworded packages are unkeyworded for lack of testing, so they are likely to try keywording them locally. They might even look into patching it if it fails.

Since we know that this package definitely won't work on these platforms without significant modifications, we can mask it to prevent them from learning this the hard way. It would save time that they could spend trying other packages.

[Comment 3 Fabian Groffen 2011-12-30 14:55:55 UTC]

I'm not really in favour of these kinds of masks, but since this package seems to support more than just linux (which I assumed it did, in the first place), I went ahead and applied the mask.