Re: Bits from the FTPMaster meeting

[Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de>]

Philipp Kern <trash@philkern.de> writes:

> On 2009-11-16, Simon Huggins <huggie@earth.li> wrote:
>> If you throw away the binaries, a DD can upload a binary package with a
>> sole binary that prints out banana and a source package that builds the
>> right thing presumably.  Are there any checks to prevent that?
>>
>> I'm trying to work out if you get what you think you do from building
>> but throwing away that makes it better than entirely source-only.
>
> You can run lintian on the resulting binaries, which you can't on source-only
> uploads.  (Well, you can only check the source package.)  Now, if that stub
> binary you upload is free from errors ftp-masters reject upon, then you can
> still work around that.
>
> And I didn't bother to check now if they really rely on binary checks yet,
> however I'd at least assume something like binary-package-is-empty.  ;-)
>
> Kind regards,
> Philipp Kern

Those could (and should) easily be checked for the binary-only uploads
from buildds. And if a maintainer keeps uploading sources that fail
the lintian checks on the buildd uploads that could be delt with
whatever other method the initial mail hinted at.

In my mind the question is: Will maintainer upload so many bad source
packages that the overhead of uploading binaries and throwing them
away makes sense? Something that can not be answered without some hard
data.

MfG
        Goswin