Re: Building packages twice in a row
Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:
> Martin Zobel-Helas <zobel@ftbfs.de> writes:
>> On Wed May 16, 2007 at 10:11:55 +0200, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
>
>>> Wouldn't it be better to unpack a package twice in two different
>>> directories, build and clean in one dir and then compare the obtained
>>> tree with the tree available in the other dir?
>
>> That would surely be the better solution to catch this policy violation.
>
> Many, many more packages would fail this and some of us (such as myself)
> believe strongly that many of the reasons why they would fail this should
> not be policy violations. I think the current test is excellent since it
> catches a concrete problem and isn't testing the current wording of policy
> in a vacuum.
>
> We at some point do need to get back to the discussion about what policy
> should say clean should actually do.
The BIG problem with this loose approach is that modifying a package
and sending in a diff becomes painfull. You build your package and run
diff and you end up with a few 100k lines of diff that are basically
all autogenerated files. The few lines actual change get easily lost
in there.
But I agree with the approach to first find and fix the cases that
FTBFS the second time around. They are the truely evil ones and
already enough work for now.
MfG
Goswin
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