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Re: The unofficial buildd effort and its shutdown - my POV



On Tue, Sep 07, 2004 at 03:42:43AM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:

> > > Part of "trusting" people is trusting that they'll act in the interests
> > > of the Debian community, which means agreeing to the SC.
> > Again, does IBM agree with the SC? Does HP?
> Does IBM have root access to the buildd?  Does HP?

Hmmm, this is weird. 
As a long term Linux user and especially a DD, I thought you would know that
having physical access to the machines (nearly always) means having root
access as well. 

> > So you are saying that the ~800 packages backlog (counting needs-build
> > and build but unhandled) on arm was all caused by one single package?
> The backlog I see consists of less than 200 packages in needs-build.

Yes, and what's one of the reasons why it's no longer >400-600 packages?

> "Built but unhandled" is hardly solvable by adding hardware, is it?

That's what I (and others) are telling since last year. Some archs don't
have a hardware problem, but a personal problem. 
But it's nice to see you agreeing with my POV in this regard... :)
 
> > It would be nice to have some preapproved people that can jump in on a
> > moments notice and setup a buildd for a few days. A fast acting
> > disater relieve team. And by that I mean are allowed to jump in. 
> No, it would be nice to have n+1 redundancy for our buildd hardware (in
> the form of excess buildd capacity that can keep up with the package
> load in spite of any single hardware failure), so that people don't

It might surprise you that for some strange (Murphys law) reasons buildds
tend to have problems at once, not one by one in row... So, having just n+1
redundancy might not be enough. 

> *need* to "jump in on a moment's notice".  If having people "jump in" is
> the best we can do, then it's the best we can do, but I still don't
> consider it "nice".

I don't know who pays your power bills, but I have to pay mine by myself and
with the increasing power costs here in Germany I tend to power off machines
that are not needed atm. So, why should I run a power consuming machine that
just builds 1-2 packages a day, being idle the most time?
But it makes sense to power them on when there's a bigger backlog. 
Nobody needs to tell me when it's necessary to turn my machines on/off. I
have eyes in my head and can track the graphs on buildd.net or buildd.d.o by
myself. Yes, I've obtained that skill during my 4 years work running an
official buildd, so I can judge on my own when an additional machine makes
sense and when not. 

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



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