[Question #708661]: switch of riscv64 builders to bos03 has broken building of many KDE source packages

[Simon Quigley]

Question #708661 on Launchpad itself changed:
https://answers.launchpad.net/launchpad/+question/708661

Simon Quigley posted a new comment:
> Let it be noted that none of the flavors are obliged to support the
riscv64 architecture. We certainly don't build flavor *images* for this
architecture.

While we aren't obliged to support it, we certainly take a "best effort"
approach. RISC-V is an interesting architecture, given that it is fully
open. It is incredibly frustrating to not have access to any sort of
Ubuntu porterbox, and it makes diagnosing these issues difficult (in
this case, I would have already ran GDB/Valgrind and figured this out,
but I can't reproduce it in Debian, and setting up an Ubuntu chroot on a
Debian porterbox is both hacky and unsupported.) While enabling RISC-V
for PPAs is a great first step, iterating on a PPA (especially for this
architecture, and the uncertainty as to *which* builder it's going to
use) is slow and painful, and how would I even run GDB in that case
anyway?

In the future, yes, we would like to fully support these images. It just
takes the appropriate amount of time, effort, and resources.

> While riscv64 isn't an architecture that we would categorically
disable desktop packages for (like ppc64el and s390x are), if the
builder issues take an unacceptable time to resolve and this is
impacting flavor development for noble, please contact the Release Team
and Archive Admins about removing the unbuildable riscv64 binaries from
the noble release pocket to unblock you. (Once the builder issues are
resolved, those failed package builds can be retried.)

Respectfully, this is a band-aid at best. If there are *any* security
issues or stable release updates required (I can speak for Lubuntu when
I say we *do* address these), are we supposed to remove riscv64 binaries
from the release pocket of a stable release too?

The best approach, in my opinion, would be to not allow Britney to block
on riscv64 for these packages, if the Launchpad Team doesn't have a
solution in-hand soon. Let me be clear: this not only blocks Noble
development, it blocks *any stable update for any release to any of
these three flavors.*

I hope we can come to a solution for this soon.

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