On Sun, Aug 17, 2003 at 07:45:31PM -0500, Joe Wreschnig wrote: > On Sun, 2003-08-17 at 18:02, Andrew Suffield wrote: > > On Sun, Aug 17, 2003 at 01:02:13PM -0500, Joe Wreschnig wrote: > > > I long for the day when binaryless uploads are mandatory (and this is > > > coming from someone who's been bitten by FTBFS more than once ). > > > > Somebody comes up with this about once every month or two. It remains > > bogus. Why do you think that it would be more likely to build if the > > maintainer builds it zero times instead of one? It seems fairly > > evident to me that this would make FTBFS issues *more* common, not > > less. > > Because if it doesn't build, it doesn't enter the archive, because there > are no packages to enter the archive. Firstly, that's just wrong. The source package would enter the archive and fail to build - so you'd have a package which was out of date on _every_ architecture. Secondly, in the current system, if it "doesn't build", then the maintainer would not be able to upload the package at all, because their build of it would fail. Source-only uploads would _remove_ this check, thereby making FTBFS issues more common. They certainly wouldn't prevent any problems that currently happen. Thirdly, this idea demonstrates a lack of understanding of what causes FTBFS bugs. It is emphatically _not_ the case that every package can be categorised as "does build" or "doesn't build". Rather, what happens is that the package builds, or not, depending on a set of (usually complicated) criteria. These change over time as the rest of the packages in the archive change. Just because a package happened to build at a given time on a given system, does not mean that it will always build on all systems in the future. It's not all that unusual for a package to build on some of the buildds and fail on others. At this point the whole thing falls apart. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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