Re: Release v1.2 timetable

[Danny Milosavljevic]

Hi zimoun,

On Wed, 7 Oct 2020 17:39:44 +0200
Danny Milosavljevic <dannym@scratchpost.org> wrote:

> > BTW, is this Bug #43720 [5] blocking for the release too?
> > 
> > Well, what is the status and the plan about this armhf topic?  

The short term plan is to only build 32 bit releases on 32 bit machines and
64 bit releases on 64 bit machines (I chose my words very carefully here.
I mean exactly that.  To be clear, do not build armhf on x86_64, do not
build armhf on aarch64, and best also do not build i686 on x86_64).

If there are already substitutes built that way, make sure to take those
offline.

This is not a fix but only a workaround--see table [1].  It IS perfectly
possible and easy for a 32 bit kernel to return a 64 bit value to userspace.
And then userspace can fail--or worse, not fail but still have an error.

Long term, I am fixing it in guix branch wip-file-offset-bits-64-sledgehammer
by enabling large file support.  That means that off_t will be 64 bits on all
architectures (including 32 bits).  Once off_t is the same size on all
architectures, an architecture-dependent off_t size mismatch can't happen,
now can it?

All the 32 bit distributions I know how enabled large file support decades
ago--so it should work fine by now.

[1] http://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/43591#30

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