Bug#844264: release.debian.org: Please clarify "Packages must autobuild without failure"

[Niels Thykier <niels@thykier.net>]

Santiago Vila:
> Dear Release Managers:
> 
> If Release Policy wording is not going to be clarified in any way, that's ok.
> 
> [...]
> 
> Please advise.
> 
> Thanks.
> 

Hi Santiago,

Thanks for your interest in this subject and for wanting to increase the
stability of builds in Debian.

As Julien mentioned earlier, build failures are sadly not as black and
white as one might want them to be.  Especially if it comes at the cost
of blindly disabling all tests in the package.

That said, we should have the talk about what is "definitely not good
enough" - it does sound like you found some interesting cases here.
  But I do not think we have capacity for that talk right now in the
release team (between an incomplete openssl transition and the BTS
breaking causing britney to migrate tons of packages despite RC bugs).

 * Could I ask you to re-raise this issue again after the freeze?
 * For the known issues, we will deal with them as usual for stretch
   even if it is suboptimal.

Thanks,
~Niels