On Tue, Oct 21, 2003 at 03:12:17PM -0500, Gunnar Wolf wrote:
> Andrew Suffield dijo [Tue, Oct 21, 2003 at 07:12:22PM +0100]:
> > Strictly as stated, your goal is accurate, but as implied, it is
> > not. You are implying that this applies only to binary packages.
> >
> > I say that failing to function when built in anything but a particular
> > artificial environment is a serious bug in a source package.
> >
> > Any action whose effect is to avoid noticing these bugs cannot be a
> > good idea.
>
> I completely agree with you. A natural environment has a much
> larger probability to introduce mistakes than an artificial one - if a
> mistake appears when building in a overly limited artificial
> environment, we can quite confidently conclude that the packager
> omitted something. Most (trivial) FTBFS bugs I have inspected arise
> from an omitted build-dependency. Many, as Sven Luther points out, are
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Be very wary of listening to Sven Luther. His comments are frequently
disconnected from reality.
This isn't a common cause of problems _at all_. It's downright
rare. If it were common, there might be more sympathy for source-only
uploads, but as it stands, most maintainers are *not* incompetent
morons.
> introduced because the natural environment (the maintainer's machine)
> has some packages that do not belong to our unstable branch and thus
> generate problematic (sometimes with problems too subtle to be easily
> found, that often arise after the package has descended into
> testing).
>
> I sent this idea because many people were debating if it would be a
> waste of autobuilder resources to restrict to source-only uploads or
> binary uploads with a discarded binary (which I think would be
> best). While writting down my idea, some extra thoughts twisted it
> beyond any recognition - but the basic idea stands. I would prefer not
> letting packages into testing which were not autobuilt.
I can't see how you can say this while "agreeing" with me. If we only
put artificially built packages in testing, then we are *not* testing
packages built in a real-world environment, so we have no real idea
how well they work.
> As a sidenote, I remember some months ago there was a thread about
> information regarding a particular developer's working environment
> being distributed with the packages they built - If everything were to
> be autobuilt, we would also get rid of this (minor, IMHO) problem.
Amusingly, the original objective was to gather the information from
buildds, since the maintainer knows what is on their own workstation.
--
.''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield
: :' : http://www.debian.org/ |
`. `' |
`- -><- |
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