Hi (not 100% sure whether this is the right list for this, but anyway) Buildd has a 'feature' to check for a very specific type of hangs in builds, where the build would produce no output for a certain amount of time. Personally, I've started to question the usefulness of this 'feature'. In all the years that I've been a buildd maintainer, I cannot remember a single instance where the timeout hit because the build did actually hang; but I can remember _lots_ of false positives. And since a loop usually does produce output every few seconds, I can remember a few false negatives. Since a false positive will usually kill a build that has been running for hours and hours already (the (insufficient) default of 300 minutes is already 5 hours), this would mean that a false positive is a very painful matter, since a build which needs a long amount of time to build (and which *has* already taken quite a while to get at the point where it was killed) needs to be redone. In other words, I feel that the timeout code is doing more harm than it is helping. Wouldn't it be better if we would just drop the timeout code? -- Fun will now commence -- Seven Of Nine, "Ashes to Ashes", stardate 53679.4
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