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Bug 925335 - ffcall: Does not support aarch64 in f19 and rawhide
Summary: ffcall: Does not support aarch64 in f19 and rawhide
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: Fedora
Classification: Fedora
Component: ffcall
Version: 23
Hardware: Unspecified
OS: Unspecified
unspecified
unspecified
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Jerry James
QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks: ARM64, F-ExcludeArch-aarch64
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2013-03-23 00:25 UTC by Dennis Gilmore
Modified: 2017-02-12 01:47 UTC (History)
4 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2016-11-20 14:02:11 UTC
Type: ---
Embargoed:

Attachments (Terms of Use)

Description Dennis Gilmore 2013-03-23 00:25:25 UTC 
Support for the ARM 64 bit CPU architecture (aarch64) was introduced in 
autoconf 2.69.  ffcall appears to use an earlier version of 
autoconf, preventing its being built.  This can be fixed in of three ways (In order of preference):

1. Work with upstream to migrate the package to autoconf 2.69.

2. Rerun autoconf or autoreconf in %prep or %build prior to running 
configure.

3. Apply the patch at http://ausil.fedorapeople.org/aarch64/ffcall/ffcall-aarch64.patch
which updates config.guess and config.sub to recognize aarch64.
Comment 1 Jerry James 2013-03-27 21:11:42 UTC 
This package contains a bunch of assembly, in order to act as glue code from non-C languages to C libraries.  Fixing this bug properly will require the writing of appropriate assembly language for the aarch64 platform.  In the meantime, I have added an ExclusiveArch tag to the spec file to explicitly list the architectures that ffcall supports.  (I believe that all current Fedora architectures are supported, and that aarch64 will be the first unsupported one.)

I am not competent to write the necessary assembly.  I am willing to approach upstream about adding aarch64 support, but will probably need to offer them both documentation and a way of testing their work.  If somebody could help me acquire those two items, I will see if upstream is willing to do the work.
Comment 2 Jerry James 2014-02-05 21:04:08 UTC 
Update: upstream is dead.  The web site asks for a volunteer to be the new maintainer.  This won't get fixed unless somebody well versed in aarch64 assembly is willing to do the work.
Comment 3 Jan Kurik 2015-07-15 14:49:42 UTC 
This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 23 development cycle.
Changing version to '23'.

(As we did not run this process for some time, it could affect also pre-Fedora 23 development
cycle bugs. We are very sorry. It will help us with cleanup during Fedora 23 End Of Life. Thank you.)

More information and reason for this action is here:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping/Fedora23
Comment 4 Peter Robinson 2016-11-20 14:02:11 UTC 
I think we'll close this as won't fix. If it's dead upstream might be worth retiring it in general.
Comment 5 Jerry James 2016-11-21 04:10:00 UTC 
Actually, there was some movement on a GSOC for ffcall last summer, although I haven't heard anything since.  So there is still a chance that something will happen upstream someday.  In any case, retiring ffcall would necessitate retiring clisp as well, which I'm not quite ready to do.  There has been recent (i.e., last 2 weeks) activity there.  I'm taking a "wait and see" stance for the moment.
Comment 6 Bruno Haible 2017-02-11 20:29:01 UTC 
There has been some recent activity in the libffcall git indeed:
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=libffcall.git;a=shortlog
Comment 7 Jerry James 2017-02-11 23:29:08 UTC 
All I see are the commits from August 2015 which went into the 1.12 release, which is what we have in Fedora.  Am I missing something?
Comment 8 Bruno Haible 2017-02-12 01:47:25 UTC 
You need to look into the git repository at https://savannah.gnu.org/git/?group=libffcall . The previous CVS repository is dead. Cf. the announcement at http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libffcall/2016-12/msg00001.html
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