Re: 2013 sometimes still feels like 2003 or 1993 (Re: NEW processing during freezes
"brian m. carlson" <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net> writes:
> The issue with sterile build environments is not just for building
> packages for normal use. If I'm fixing a bug in a package, I may need
> to build that package several times, testing different fixes. If
> everyone assumes that packages will be built in a sterile environment,
> nobody will care that their packages don't build twice in a row, but
> that's exactly the situation that I have when trying to test a patch.
> Also, I'm not going to set up an entire chroot or sbuild or pbuilder
> environment just to test a patch. Packages should definitely be built
> for the archive in a clean environment, but they should still build
> correctly in an unclean one.
It's not far from the truth to say that the only features in any piece of
software that will work reliably are those that are tested. Currently,
the initial architecture upload is produced by a wide variety of different
techniques; some of us build directly on the host system, some build in
pbuilder, some in cowbuilder, some in sbuild, etc. This does not result
in any reliable testing of builds in unclean environments. Any testing of
that done via the initial architecture build is accidental, when viewed
across the archive as a whole.
The way to ensure that builds in non-clean environments work properly is
to devise a method for testing them, and to do those tests on a regular
basis and turn test failures into bugs.
Trying to get at this testing indirectly by putting conditions on initial
archive uploads doesn't really accomplish the goal. It's a very random
and scattershot way of testing that already doesn't work for any of us who
use pbuilder and cowbuilder already.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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