Re: my thoughts on the Vancouver Prospectus

[Karsten Merker <karsten@excalibur.cologne.de>]

On Fri, Mar 18, 2005 at 06:44:46PM -0800, Steve Langasek wrote:
> [cc:ed back to -devel, since these are technical questions being raised and
> answered]

> > * Why is the permitted number of buildds for an architecture restricted to
> >   2 or 3?
> 
> - Architectures which need more than 2 buildds to keep up with package
>   uploads on an ongoing basis are very slow indeed; while slower,
>   low-powered chips are indeed useful in certain applications, they are
>   a) unlikely to be able to usefully run much of the software we currently
>   expect our ports to build, and b) definitely too slow in terms of
>   single-package build times to avoid inevitably delaying high-priority
>   package fixes for RC bugs.

a) is true for some big packages like GNOME and KDE, but that
does not impede the architecture's usefulness for other software
we have in the archive.

For b) running distcc (which we currently do not do) over a
number of machines might be a solution, at least it should be
investigated before thinking about dropping an architecture.

> - If an architecture requires more than 3 buildds to be on-line to keep up
>   with packages, we are accordingly spreading thin our trust network for
>   binary packages.  

We currently spread our trust network for uploading binary
packages over roughly 1000 developers and their (probably more
than 1000) machines. Sorry, but that is really a non-argument.

Regards,
Karsten
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