Hi Iain, Unfortunately your question in the CI BoF yesterday came late and my stream by that time was minutes behind. I also needed some time to process your question. I don't have all the answers yet that I think are relevant, but let's start discussing. I think your question was something like "issues are only found late by indirect reverse dependencies, by which time there is not much to do that accept the situation. Does Debian also experience that?" First, I do find issues like that and I create bugs (hopefully with the right severity) as I create bugs for most regressions that aren't related to unsolved bugs in our infrastructure. Second, because how Debian works with a different baseline (our baseline is the current situation in testing, rather than all past results for a package) than Ubuntu, the bug report is there but the baseline is updated automatically so the problem for gating "goes away". What is missing in Debian (but can be added relatively easily added once somebody sets his/her mind to it by looking at the database), is finding regressions in the baseline that weren't spotted during migration. In Debian this indeed is an issue right now in the sense that this isn't noticed (as it isn't noticed in Ubuntu until after the culprit migrated). I think a real solution may be to test not only the direct reverse dependencies, but also indirect reverse dependencies. If I am correct ci.debian.net (with 10 workers for unstable and testing) is doing that for the unstable archive for years already so this is probably less problematic than it sounds, although I am a bit worried about the time it takes sometimes. (We could add more workers of course). Related note, we test all packages in a pure testing environment at least once a week, so if needed, figuring out what changed is easier than for you (you noted that there may have been quite some time between tests in Ubuntu), although we aren't doing that yet. What do you (and others) think? Paul
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