Re: About ignoring problems instead of fixing them
On Thursday 24 December 2009, you wrote:
> I saw that the graphical images weren't available any more so I
> disabled them.
Problem is that you did not disable them. You only silently ignored a
failure, with the result that you were creating broken images. If I had
not accidentally caught that now, we would have had a release with broken
images.
I would not have minded if you'd ignored the failure and at the same time
informed people of the problem so that it could be looked into and solved
properly.
> From the last discussion I saw fly past, it looks like
> the lack of graphical images is a known feature.
Yes. They have been disabled on purpose. But the system is supposed to be
flexible enough to *see* whether or not D-I is building graphical images
[1] and then excluding those options from the isolinux menu.
But because we've never had that situation before, this was not actually
implemented 100% on the D-I side.
debian-cd uses the file f3.txt.withgtk to test "do we have graphical or
not", so D-I should not be including that file if graphical is disabled.
> I'm getting dozens of
> complaints every time the weekly builds fail these days, so with no
> further information to go on and no warning from the d-i folks I took
> this choice.
There was no warning because it was supposed to work. That means that we
need a main or bug report to inform us of breakage. Without that there's
no trigger to fix the problem.
So now we need an extra upload of D-I to fix the problem instead of having
had the problem fixed shortly after Otavio committed the change to disable
the graphical images.
> It's getting painful using the daily-built d-i images for the weekly
> testing CDs, as the number of broken builds is very high.
True. Weekly builds are supposed to be built from released D-I images
instead of daily images. Unfortunately the D-I release manager has been
unable to get a release out so far.
> I would
> really *really* like to see d-i properly integrated into the archive
> and uploaded periodically so it can migrate to testing, as we've
> discussed in the past many times. The current situation is a train
> wreck.
This broken record argument from you will not help *at all* (as I've tried
to explain several times in the past).
Do you really think that when people are unable to get a release going in
almost a year that "periodic uploads" magically are going to be correct?
If daily builds fail then builds "integrated in the archive" will fail just
as hard. One solution could be to change the upload script for D-I daily
images to not upload anything except the log files if a daily build fails.
The real problem is that nobody is monitoring builds, doing any testing or
fixing any issues on any frequent basis. Not like Joey and I used to do in
the past.
I currently do not consider myself as the person who monitors things, so I
only react to concrete reported problems. Even so if I do still seem to
end up catching and fixing most issues.
BTW, I thought that d-cd simply kept the old images if a build failed for
an arch, or is that only implemented for daily builds?
Cheers,
FJP
[1] There is a difference between a graphical images failing and being
disabled. The case of graphical images failing while normal images do
build is not handled, but that is fairly exceptional.
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