Re: A question about update-excuses (was Re: testing is broken)
On Thu, Apr 12, 2001 at 11:32:38PM +0100, Philip Blundell wrote:
> >No, that doesn't follow.
> >
> >You can either (a) load up the buildd machines for a limited period of time
> >(until they 'catch up') and then start checking build-deps properly again,
> >or (b) have one buildd machine (say, the i386 one) do full checking of
> >build-deps, and the rest can be lax. There are probably other options.
>
> Yeah, maybe. I'm sceptical that the first option would buy much -- it would
> certainly give a short-term improvement and allow more packages to go
> into testing today, but they'd rapidly become outdated again as soon as we
> started requiring proper build-depends. Having just one buildd do checking also
> wouldn't do us much good: even one architecture falling behind will keep the
> binaries out of testing, and you'd end up concentrating the burden of
> reporting these bugs on the administrators of just that one autobuilder.
>
> Fundamentally, the problem is that the maintainers don't actually use the
> source dependencies directly, and they don't have any easy way to verify that
> they're correct. I'd guess that something like 5-10% of the packages being
> uploaded have some kind of build-depends problem. Often it takes several
> iterations to get them right, and new versions of other packages can require
> them to change again ("xpm4g-dev" being a prime example; I got so fed up of
> filing bugs on that one that I did end up giving in and hacking the build
> daemon to work around it.)
>
Has anyone thought to take something like dep.pl or one of the other
scripts for determining build-deps, and integrating it into lintian?
Seems to me if there is a semi reliable way to find build-deps, lintian
can run it and compare to control file, with appropriate warnings and
errors?
Just a thought.
Gordon Sadler
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