Re: Debian needs more buildds. It has offers. They aren't being accepted.
Martin Michlmayr - Debian Project Leader <leader@debian.org> writes:
> * Chris Cheney <ccheney@cheney.cx> [2004-02-12 01:06]:
> > Saying "oh well" about lack of communication is not something I
> > would expect to hear from DPL!
>
> Oh well. Debian is a very diverse community and there is no way
> everyone is going to be able to communicate with everyone. This is
> just a fact I have to acknowledge. There are various possible
> solutions from this. One would be to make people more communicative,
> but this is usually not possible because people have their personality
> and won't change. The other possibility would be to replace the
> people who cannot communicate and replace them with people who can
> communicate _and_ do the work. Unfortunately, finding such people is
> often hard (there are some good examples in Debian for this, though,
> like Colin Watson just to pick one who is a sheer pleasure to talk to
> and who gets lots of work done). In the specific case of buildd, Ryan
> has done the major work to keep the buildd infrastructure running in
> the last months, and there is no better replacement. He could be
> replaced by someone who is more communicative, but then the work
> wouldn't get done. Is that what you want? The other option, and the
No, but assisted by someone with the skills. Its easy enough for
someone to check the buildd config or add files to REDO or change the
wanna-build state.
Why not add Ingos offered buildds under Wouters administration for
mips for example? They have been communicating and working fine so
far. Ryans workload would be reduce and mips would get someone to talk
to (that also talks back to them).
Or give someone else Ryan feels comfortable with an account for the
existing buildd so he can look after things too.
Same goes for the arm buildds (and any other arch with just one
admin). There has to be a fallback. Someone in a different timezone
would be good for round the clock service.
If all the complaint archives is getting info once we will be back
here in two month with exactly the same problem.
> one most appropriate in this case imho, is for the DPL to act as
> intermediate. I don't say "oh well, there is a lack of communication,
> let's just not talk about it and ignore this issue. Instead, I say
> "oh well, I cannot change the personality of these people". However,
> something I _can_ do, and this is one reason I decided to run for DPL
> last year, is that I _can_ talk to all kinds of different people. I
> have no problem talking to Goswin and Ingo, and at the same time I'm
> in virtually daily contact with James and also usually can communicate
> with Ryan. And, in fact, I found two mails from him in my mbox this
> morning: one about mipsel, one about mips.
And your doing a damn fine job at it. Can't say that often enough. :)
> If there is lack of communication, the DPL surely has to deal with it.
> I approach it by stepping in as intermediate and to resolve the problem
> this way, and I think this fulfils the role of the DPL quite well.
> (Other DPLs might approach it differently - it's all a matter of
> personality; in the end, the question is which approach works best,
> and I think mine is quite successful, certainly more successful than
> just replacing various people with others when there are no good
> replacements available. You can only work with the resources you
> have, and I try to do that as well as possible.)
Replacing was a poor / too strong choise of words. Encouraging to take
assistance was probably more the incentive wanted.
> > A mailing list that is in a visible place such as lists.debian.org for
> > people to mail buildd admins for retries and to see status updates for
> > archs would be very nice. :) As I understand it the various archs have
> > buildd lists now but they are hidden.
>
> As far as I know, there are no hidden lists. Most ports use the
> debian-<arch> list on lists.debian.org. The major exception being
> m68k which is hosted somewhere else - but this is a public list, too,
> and is listed at http://www.debian.org/ports/m68k/. Are there any
> hidden lists I'm not aware of?
> --
> Martin Michlmayr
> leader@debian.org
MfG
Goswin
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