autopkgtest always fail on i386 for f and later

[Dan Streetman]

[impact]

all autopkgtest runs fail for i386 arch for focal and later, since i386 is no longer a fully supported arch; the test run fails due to missing test deps.

this is super annoying.

[test case]

run autopkgtest for i386 for f or g or later.

[regression potential]

as this only disables/skips all testing on i386 for f and later, any regression would likely cause incorrectly failed or skipped autopkgtests for non-i386 archs.

[scope]

this is needed for f and later.

i386 is a fully supported arch for b and earlier.

[Balint Reczey (rbalint)]

IMO this should be fixed in hints handling in autopkgtest-cloud and not on per package basis. Obsolete tests should not be run.

[Balint Reczey (rbalint)]

And I agree that this is super annoying - for thousands of packages.

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

It should definitely not be changed in the systemd source package. But the systemd test failures on i386 are already ignored by hints a I don't understand why this bug has been raised.

(Also the triggering of tests and blocking of migration based on results is a function of proposed-migration, not autopkgtest.)

[Dan Streetman (ddstreet)]

> this should be fixed in hints handling in autopkgtest-cloud

+1 - autopkgtest-cloud shouldn't even bother running i386 tests for focal or later, or at most the default should be to skip them unless there is some configuration to explicitly run them

> the systemd test failures on i386 are already ignored by hints

because britney isn't the only thing that runs autopkgtests, e.g. tests run manually from ppas will always see failures in i386.

I've updated autopkgtest-manager to never submit or check results for i386 on focal or later (i.e. i worked around the breakage), I assume others who use autopkgtest will similarly hack a workaround into their tooling (but it's too bad we need to)

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

Also, there are NOT thousands of packages in the same situation as systemd. systemd is a whitelisted package which is still built on i386, which has tests that can't be run (because we run our autopkgtests on amd64 and apt will not allow you to switch from an amd64 systemd to an i386 systemd noninteractively). There are only a handful of packages in this situation, all of which have had hints added manually to ignore their test results on i386.

The more general class of problem, that test failures are treated as regressions which should not be, is tracked as https://bugs.launchpad.net/britney/+bug/1700668