Re: The wider implications of debhelper/dbus breakage
On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 12:10:56PM +0200, Luk Claes wrote:
> Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> >Right. However, having sbuild run lintian would allow a buildd
> >maintainer to assess issues with packages by looking at *warnings*,
> >rather than 'just' errors. This isn't something an automated system can
> >do.
>
> Right, though that's why we expect maintainers to look at them.
> Although there may be architecture specific lintian warnings, they
> should be really rare.
They would still catch this kind of bug, though. Also, there *are* many
system-specific warnings emitted by gcc, and those can easily be picked
up by mutt highlighting.
> Besides, we want to get some support for autosigning packages built
> on the buildds. So we improve the speed of buildd uploads and we
> make the job of buildd maintainer more attractive to porters so they
> could really investigate (architecture specific) build errors
> instead of spending time in downloading, checking and signing
> successful build logs.
Hmm.
I'm not sure that's very useful, really. Due to scripts and mutt's GPG
key passphrase caching, my daily buildd mail signing stuff never takes
more than a minute[1], even on days with hundreds of logs that need to
be signed (except if highlighting tells me that there's something that
needs to be looked at, obviously). Perhaps such scripts could be shared,
but other than that...
Additionally, I personally dislike a buildd host that is silent in the
usual case. The fact that there is routinely "something to do" forces me
to continually think about it and not neglect the things I need to do to
maintain it[2]. You'll note that there've been times when the powerpc
dailies were broken for long amounts of time in a row, when I used to
maintain it; this is mainly because the system's output would not be
very different between 'nothing is working' and 'everything is working
fine', so I just wouldn't notice when things were broken.
In other words, I personally do not feel that, from a buildd
maintainer's point of view, the "disadvantages" of having to sign mails
(which is no work at all, really) outweigh the advantages (me being
much, /much/ more aware of what's happening, and being able to take care
of it that much better). I understand that the delay in uploading that's
inherent in manual action isn't ideal from an RM's point of view, but
then that shouldn't be more than 24 hours in the usual case anyway (and
if it is, that's a sign that the buildd maintainer is getting bored with
the job, or needs help, or some such, which shouldn't be the usual case
anyway).
[1] and a minute really is exceptional; the average is more like 10
seconds or so.
[2] obviously there'll always be times when I'm too busy to look at that
stuff for a few days in a row, but those are the exception rather
than the rule.
--
The biometric identification system at the gates of the CIA headquarters
works because there's a guard with a large gun making sure no one is
trying to fool the system.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/01/biometrics.html
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