Bug#932795: Ethics of FTBFS bug reporting
On Tue, Jul 23, 2019 at 01:54:10PM +0200, Santiago Vila wrote:
>...
> * I'm told that single-cpu systems are an oddity and that most
> physical machines manufactured today are multi-core, but this
> completely fails to account that single-cpu systems are today more
> affordable than ever thanks to virtualization and cloud providers.
>
> Just because most desktop systems are multi-core does not mean that we
> can blindly assume that the end user will use a desktop computer to
> build packages, or that users who do not build packages using a
> desktop computer deserve less support. We don't discriminate
> minorities just because they are minorities.
>...
Trying to support using low-end machines for large-scale package
building is much effort for marginal value.
Many package builds are tailored to build on the buildds,
and the packages won't build on lower spec machines.
In some cases package builds are even pinned to specific buildds
when a package does not build on all buildds for an architecture
(e.g. FPU-heavy software not building on buildds with FPU emulation).
Thousands of packages will not build on machines without sufficient
amount of RAM, and that's apparently fine for you.
A single-core VM with 8 GB RAM would be a weird setup for CPU-heavy work
like package building.
If you want to work on having more packages build on single-core CPUs
that's appreciated, but the usecase is so exotic that your attempts of
trying to force other people to work on that through RC bugs only
prevent people from working on more important issues.
There is a clear ethical difference between working on whatever one
personally considers important, and trying to force other people to
work on what one personally considers important.
cu
Adrian
--
"Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
"Only a promise," Lao Er said.
Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed
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