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Re: Debian needs more buildds. It has offers. They aren't being accepted.



* Ingo Juergensmann <ij@2004.bluespice.org> [2004-02-11 23:26]:
> Having 10 machines can mean, 10 machines can fail. Having 1 machine, means
> only one machine can fail. Whereas the first seems to introduce higher
> possibility oof failures, it also means that there is a redundancy because
> of:
> 10 machines - one fail -> 10% of CPU time fails
> 1 machine - one fail -> 100% of CPU time fails

Sure, I know that; please see what I wrote about "redundancy" in the
case of ARM.  However, adding more machines infinitely is not the
great panacea either since certain downsides are associated with
adding more machines.  It created more load for ftp-master, and (more
importantly) is a bigger potential for security attacks; etc.

However, as I wrote in my previous mail, we are working on getting
more ARM, mips and mipsel hardware, either to be used as buildd
directly or to have as fallback in case it's needed.  We don't try to
pile that hardware up for fun, but to make sure we have a certain
amount of redundancy and some fallback options; plus enough machines
for various porting work.

> Hrm, not exactly as I understood his original mail.  One part of his
> complain was that Ryan was some sort of unresponsive, although there
> were several postings on debian-mips requesting the building of
> qt-x11-free, but nothing happened. *This* is some sort of
> unacceptable.

Yeah, I was quite frustrated with this as well.  Oh well, there are
just many different people in Debian and we have to try a way to work
together.  Some people are very communicative while others just do
their work -- and Ryan generally does his work.  I remember a recent
request on debian-mips to have a package recompiled, and while Ryan
did not respond to the mail, looking at incoming.d.o showed that he
had acted upon the request.  It would have been nice to also get a
short mail saying so, but then again this would take away time from
his work.  Some developers do take that time to respond and others
don't.  In the case of qt-x11-free, I'm not sure exactly what the
problem was.  However, simply uploading a totally untested package
as Goswin did isn't ideal either (especially since someone else had
built the package already and asked for testers).

> Hmmm, there was an offer to one of my subscribed Irix Mailing lists for some
> SGI machines to give away for free on a certain day in Oberhausen (Germany).

Some mips people in Germany are looking for new hardware (in
particular Karsten who only has some old SGI), so please forward that
posting to debian-mips.

> > (In the meantime, to make the problem worse, casals.d.o needs a new
> > kernel and cannot be used as buildd in the meantime.  This should
> > hopefully be fixed soon, though.)
> 
> Erm, why can't a machine be used as a buildd *and* for DDs to port/debug
> their packages?

I didn't say it cannot.  It cannot be used as buildd at the moment
because the kernel is too old.  libc on mips needs a current kernel or
something like that.

> > In summary, the currently problematic architectures are being
> > worked on.
> 
> But it seems as only Ryan, James and you are know of that. For all
> others it seems as nothing would happen. It would nice to have those
> information better communicated to other people. If someone give me

Well, James is responsible for ARM, Ryan for mips, so obviously they
know.  I did mention on -mips that one mipsel buildd was down, and the
ARM boards are a recent donation.

> But then again, it doesn't make much sense to setup new buildds when
> you have to wait some weeks until they can get w-b access.

You mentioned that one m68k buildd got access within a day or so, so
obviously it cannot be that bad.  I mentioned before that I don't see
a problem with the m68k machines you're currently building to get
access to w-b either.  As to those which haven't been added yet,
perhaps you should just get the hint and use them for something else
(such as d-i).

> I would wish that we can establish a way to interact with each other
> in a productive way for the sake of the project. Maybe a new mailing
> list for all buildd admins (and related persons such as buildd
> hosters) would be nice

I certainly think such a mailing list would be a good idea.

-- 
Martin Michlmayr
leader@debian.org



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