Re: First pass all buildds before entering unstable
On Wed, Nov 19, 2003 at 03:12:42PM +0100, Andreas Tille wrote:
> On Wed, 19 Nov 2003, Andrew Suffield wrote:
> > This seems like a solution in search of a problem. What problem are
> > you actually trying to solve? Start by describing it, then we can try
> > dreaming up ways to solve it. [Given your vague description of what
> > this would accomplish, I have a few guesses about what you might be
> > trying to do, and I think there are probably less intrusive and more
> > effective approaches].
>
> Sorry if my English is not as brilliant to explain the problem clearly
> to everybody. So I try a simple example:
>
> http://qa.debian.org/developer.php?excuse=postgresql
>
> If there would be a recent perl for each architecture postgresql
> would have entered testing. I guess there was a working perl before
> there was trouble with MIPS buildd which wuold have enabled postgresql
> to enter testing.
And if we hadn't had perl 5.8.1 in unstable, then we would never have
spotted its binary incompatibility with 5.8.0. Upstream released 5.8.2
precisely because the problem had been discovered in Debian unstable.
Under your proposal, we would have remained unaware of the problem for
much longer, which would have been a bad thing.
This is in fact an excellent example of how fixing build problems isn't
enough to ensure a quality distribution, and how it's often important to
parallelize fixing build problems and other problems rather than
serializing the two tasks.
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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