Re: debian-ports.org getting relatively unstable (hppa)

[Helge Deller <deller@gmx.de>]

On 12/15/2013 06:32 AM, Dave Land wrote:
> Not sure what's up at debian-ports.org, but I've been trying to 
> debootstrap 2 different HPPA machines for the last couple days and 
> have been getting a variety of errors (size mismatches, files not 
> found when they were there 20 minutes before, etc. etc.) Somebody may
> want to look into this before it gets out of hand. Thanks! :)

I maybe should add some more background here, and maybe someone
here on the list might have an idea on how to proceed.

Background is, that Dave and myself have binmnu-uploaded the necessary
packages for hppa so that debootstrap worked. Then we proceeded with the necessary
packages for sbuild and schroot, so that I now have a buildd installed
which should be able to start building packages. I haven't turned it
on yet though for the reasons which I explain in a few seconds...  

In the meantime we have of course uploaded a few more packages which
now currently break debootstrap. This is fixable manually, but I instead
of uploading packages manually now, I would prefer to get the buildd
going instead... So, Dave Land, please wait a little bit...

Now to the reasons why I didn't turned on the buildd yet:
We noticed, that when we manually binmnu-upload packages, which are
already in the *same version* on debian-ports, then debian-ports ACCEPT 
those packages, but if we then try to apt-get-update those later on, this leads
to a "size mismatch" error. I do have the feeling, that this is a 
problem on debian-ports. I noticed for example that reprepro usually
doesn't accept packages of the same version which doesn't seem to be
the case on debian-ports.
So, I'm anxious, that if I start the buildd, it will happily build and upload packages
which we already uploaded to debian-ports. If this happens we will get more
size-mismatch errors.

A trivial example:
On machine buildd.debian-ports.org I run:
deller@leda:~$ wb info hello . hppa
* hello/hppa
  | hello:
  |   Package             : hello
  |   Version             : 2.8-4
  |   State               : Needs-Build
  |   Section             : devel
  |   Priority            : source
  |   Previous-State      : 
  |   State-Change        : 2013-02-18 00:03:36.782007
  |   CalculatedPri       : 52
  |   component           : main
  |   Distribution        : sid
  |   Notes               : out-of-date
  |   State-Days          : 300
  |   State-Time          : 25958430

So, the package "hello" would need a rebuild according to the wanna-build database,
and that would wb probably tell my buildd who then would start building/uploading it.
But on http://ftp.debian-ports.org/debian/pool-hppa/main/h/hello/ you can
see, that the hello-package is already uploaded at version 2.8-4
So, if my buildd now uploads the newly created hello package, I'm sure
we will run again into the size-mismatch problem.

Now, Aurelien mentioned last week to me, that this size-mismatch error 
might be because of the "apt-ftparchive cache might have been corrupted for hppa".
I'm not 100% sure about that.

My question here on the list would be, if you (other arch-porters) do have an idea
on how I should proceed.
Best solution would probably be, if the wanna-build database rescans what's in
the archive already. Is this possible?
Or, should I just start the buildd and see what's happening? If we then get
the size-mismatch errors there is lot of manual work to fix it (unless resetting the
apt-ftparchive on debian-ports would solve this).
Any other ideas?

Helge