Re: Let's remove mips, mipsel, s390, ... (Was: [Fwd: Re: GTK+2.0 2.6.2-3 and buildds running out of space])

[Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org>]

On Mon, Feb 21, 2005 at 12:09:16AM -0300, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> On Sun, 20 Feb 2005, Brian Nelson wrote:
> > Also, really huge stuff, like KDE, cannot be uploaded as frequently
> > as perhaps the maintainers would like because it kills the slower
> > buildd's for a few days.
> 
> The answer to that is to setup a dist-cc cluster for these archs,
> where only the master node is in the slow arch, and everything else is
> a fast arch.

That would require cross-compilers on the other hosts in the distcc
cluster, and (unless I don't understand how dist-cc works; never had a
look at it) a mechanism to install build-dependencies on those hosts in
addition to the one on the 'slow' node.

There are a few reasons why we usually avoid cross-compilers for buildd
purposes. For one, as one cannot as easily test a cross-compiler by
running a test suite, it may have been miscompiled -- but you wouldn't
notice; this would result in strange, hard to debug behaviour by the
resulting cross-compiled packages. For another, satisfying
build-dependencies for cross-compiling is pretty hard, as anyone using
dpkg-cross can tell you.

Our answer simply is (or at least, should be) to increase the number of
buildd hosts if we can't keep up, and to request the maintainers of
large packages that they don't do daily updates, which is a bad idea
anyway. If maintainers insist on doing daily updates, we stop building
their package. See mozilla-snapshot (even though it's no longer in the
archive these days).

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