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Re: update on binary upload restrictions



James Troup dijo [Thu, Jan 25, 2007 at 01:23:35AM +0000]:
> [heavy-SNIP]
>
>  (a) we don't currently have the buildd infrastructure for this - it
>      would require a minimum of 2 (preferably 3) machines dedicated to
>      being i386 buildds.  It would also make i386 uploads much more
>      sensitive to delays and really require better coverage than one
>      human could provide.
> (...)
> We should probably fix (a) regardless, but the point is that it's not
> where it needs to be right now. 

Yes, this needs to be taken care of, and earlier rather than later. We
are facing a great popularization of the AMD64 architecture, which
might become comparably popular to i386 during Etch's stable lifetime
(no numbers to back this up - push it up or down as you prefer). We
will no longer have such a dominant architecture. I'm sure Debian will
have no problem finding some i386 buildd hardware - only people apt to
be the buildd admins. And, by having this, we will overcome our main
technical obstacle for source-only uploads.

>  (b) source only uploads are in my experience very often badly tested
>      if they're even tested at all.  For a long time after Ubuntu
>      switched to source only uploads, it was really obvious that a
>      large number of them hadn't even been test built, never mind
>      installed or used.[3][4]
> 
> And maybe I'm wrong about how much (b) would be a problem.  *shrug*
> Just MO. 

Umh... Yes, you have vastly more experience than I on this regard, but
still... We are a community of people aiming at technical
excellence. And still, we all have slacked. I have uploaded
uninstallable or unrebuildable packages (but, hey, I have acted fast
on fixing them! ;-) ) My point is: We are now uploading quite
imperfect packaging every now and then. What happens? Usually, that it
FTBFS on several architectures, and we get a bug. On arch:all packages
(such as most of my packages), however, they do not get automatically
rebuilt before entering unstable. If I'm a lousy maintainer, Debian is
more at a loss at my bad work than if we had to autobuild arch:all -
And arch:all can be built by any of the buildds with some cycles to
spare (yes, although implementing this might have to change some
processes in the wanna-build infrastructure), so m68k won't be hogged
down building my Perl modules.

Greetings,

-- 
Gunnar Wolf - gwolf@gwolf.org - (+52-55)5623-0154 / 1451-2244
PGP key 1024D/8BB527AF 2001-10-23
Fingerprint: 0C79 D2D1 2C4E 9CE4 5973  F800 D80E F35A 8BB5 27AF

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