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The unofficial buildd effort and its shutdown - my POV (was: Bug#241689: I'm going to NMU this)



On Sat, Sep 04, 2004 at 11:44:36AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:

> > Note that there were one rejected person (me), two non DDs and 5 DDs
> > directly involved in that group of buildds. Also the buildds were setup
> > following the recommendations in the big buildd flameware a while back
> > to setup our own wanna-build to work without of James wanna-build. Noone
> > ever mentioned that buildds must be sanctioned or any other restrictions
> > for them.
> Something that I'm a little confused about here....  Did you all turn off
> your extra buildd network because someone in charge (an ftpmaster, the
> DPL, etc.) told you to stop uploading the binaries they built or stopped
> accepting those uploads, or did you turn them off because there was a
> thread about binary NMUs in debian-devel and you felt insulted or attacked
> by the opinions expressed in it?  I couldn't tell just from reading the
> thread, and my reaction to these events, and my reaction to all of this is
> likely to be substantially different depending on which it was.

Well, as being one of those buildd host admins, i'm feeling very frustrated
and tired about how non-DDs are treated by the project. 
I'm contributing for about 3 or 4 years now as a buildd host admin (namely
arrakis for m68k) and helped the m68k port back then in keeping up, because
kullervo as the only buildd at that time couldn't keep up anymore. 
Since then arrakis built some thousands packages for sure and I worked to
get more buildds online in order to keep up with m68k. 
Everything was fine until m68k had troubles to keep up again during the last
year. We needed some extra CPU power to keep up and Goswin was offering two
machines. There have been talk behind the scenes that Goswin is an "unwanted
person" for some obscure reason (an old story dealing with EagleLinux where
he was involved in), but that story was years ago and I saw no reason why
that should be a reason to not to use his CPU power. 

In parallel I tried to get other m68k machines online and succeeded there. 
I had seriously no problems with James Troup - until I began to work
together with Goswin on the buildd front. Since then it was difficult to get
new buildds added to the ACLs for wanna-build. At the same time other people
managed to get their new buildds added within days, whereas my buildds were
stucked for *weeks*. Coincidence?

I offered as well last years autumn a few MIPS machines for the mips port.
They were rejected for very obscure reasons such as "You have no knowledge
on mips", "This machines are two slow...", etc... Note that the very same
machines helped to bring down the backlog on mips withhin two weeks now. 

Well, anyway... what have we done the last weeks?
We put some buildds online because the buildd admins for some certain archs
failed to take appropriate steps to be able in dealing with the expected
higher package upload rates before a release. They failed in doing their
job, i.e. signing packages, upload them and taking care of what a buildd
admin usually should do. In my eyes they failed in total. 
We tried to help the maintainers in getting their packages into sarge, to
resolve queue related problems when a package was stuck in the queue, we
helped in speeding up the tiff3g transition. We successfully lowered the
backlog on archs such as alpha, mips, mipsel and tried to achieve this as
well on arm. 
The security, which is mentioned and stressed *so* many times in this
thread, was the same level as it was for "offical" buildds for several years
now - and still is. I'm the same guy who was trusted in 2000 to be able to
build packages for Debian as I'm still today. 

But there are people who argue that non-DDs can't be trusted and that
untrusted uploads and untrusted buildds are harming Debians trust at all. 
So, they're neglecting my past 4 years work for Debian. Isn't that nice?

Currently I'm running "unofficial" buildds for m68k (spice, arrakis, and in
some regards akire as well), mips (paco, pepe, pancho, soon sancho), sparc
(ypsilon) and powerpc (muaddib). Some of these machines are happily used by
gcc porters, so the workload on "official" buildds was lowered. 

And still some people argue that I'm not trustworthy. What a farce!

I don't think that's surprising that I'm frustrated and tired of all these
stuff directed against me and that I'm not wasting my time and money any
longer when it's obvious that my work is not appreciated anymore.

So, please decide first (as a project) if you appreciate my work and trust
me (although I'm no DD) or if you prefer to have backlogged ports. 
(No, this is no extortion or anything like that. I just want to know how
reliable Debian as a project is and how well I can trust *you* and if you
still appreciate what I'm doing or not.) 

I'm sick of all that unproductive chattering instead of getting things done.

-- 
Ciao...              // 
      Ingo         \X/



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