Re: Bits from the FTPMaster meeting
Le Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 08:27:22AM +0100, Yves-Alexis Perez a écrit :
>
> Unless your proposal is just for unstable but doesn't want to change the
> policy for testing migration?
Hi,
Testing migration works the way it should: if a package is never built on an
architecture, testing migration is not prevented. The problem is that for the
sake of universality, some programs are built where nobody wants them. Then
when there is a build failure, nobody wants the ‘hot potato’. Upstream does not
support non-mainstream arches, the porters are busy porting more central
packages, the package maintainer has user requests to answer and knows that
nobody will send him kudos for building the package where it is not used.
Currently, if I put ‘Arch: i386 amd64’, in the debian/control file, it makes
difficulties to the people who want to build the package for their own purposes
on a different architectures, because dpkg-gencontrol will fail. If instead of this
it would only throw a warning like ‘Unsupported architecture, use at your own risk.’,
then the maintainer could use this field to control the list of architectures
he is willing to support. Official buildds could then ignore the unsupported ones.
I would be more than happy to have user feedback asking me to support more
architectures on a case-by-case basis. But my point is that for most of my
packages those users simply do not exist. On the other hand, as Raphaël noted,
building everyghing everywhere is not so easy, so my conclusion is that for the
universality of building we spend energy that could be used to improve our
universality of using.
If there is a general agreement that maintainers should be trusted and allowed
to restrict the set of build architectures on their packages, I can have a look
at the dpkg-gencontrol source code and propose a patch…
And to return on the topic of this thread, if we decrease the number of
packages built by default on some slow architectures, we release some pressure
from the build network, which makes it more fault-tolerant and removes a reason
given to disallow source-only uploads.
Have a nice day,
--
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan
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