Re: Debian needs more buildds. It has offers. They aren't being accepted.
Michael Banck:
>IMHO, buildds are important, but keeping them current is not nearly as
>important as you want to believe. It's not like "OMG, a buildd went
>down, stop the presses!!!1!". And it's not a sport either ("If we've had
>three more buildd for arch foo, we'd be up from 97.3% to at least 98.5%,
>but *you* block the future of mankind")
Actually, the interesting thing is that it isn't the total percentage that
matters. It's the 'keystone' packages at the bottom of dependency chains,
the ones which prevent large numbers of other packages from building and/or
getting into sarge -- these have a knock-on effect causing delays far, far
longer than the delay for the package itself.
Apparently the buildds don't have a system for realizing automatically that
these need to be expedited. Worse, apparently the buildd admins don't have a
system for realizing manually that they need to be expedited. :-P
Since I couldn't think of an automated system (I know, I know), I've been
working on the, uh, manual system, you could say?
Single points of failure are also a nasty nasty problem; when the lone mipsel
buildd goes down, it puts mipsel way behind very quickly.
--
Incidentally, www.buildd.net provides a beautiful status page for each
architecture showing essentially exactly what problems exist. Well, when the
appropriate buildd people are participating. It's fairly new, so I don't
expect immediate participation, but it's so sweet that I hope everyone
participates pretty soon. :-)
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