Built-Using, again…

[Thorsten Glaser <tg@mirbsd.de>]

Hi all,

it still happens, occasionally, that buildd chroots are not
updated, which leads to mksh builds refer old versions of
gcc or some libc (used when linking the mksh-static binary)
in its Built-Using field. The buildd admin gets a REJECT
from dak, because the version is neither in testing (yet or
still) and not in unstable (any more) and so not known to
dak. The buildd admins do not react on this and happily
ignore eMails asking them, politely, to dist-upgrade their
buildd chroots and restart the build (giveback), for days.

Your average package maintainer would probably not be happy
with this. Disabling Built-Using is for backports, not for
sid, though, as it’s, strictly speaking, a Policy violation.

Now, the package doesn’t migrate to testing because the
powerpc binaries are missing. (There’s still the delay,
but let’s ignore that for a moment.) And we can’t have
rebuilds within jessie – which would, hopefully, be ACCEPTed
by dak – either, as the source package is not in testing yet.

sbuild/buildd runs apt-get update, but not apt-get *upgrade,
before each build. But I assume this should not be changed
either…

So we need either a technical, or a policy-ical, or a human,
solution to this problem, right?

Thanks,
//mirabilos
-- 
Sometimes they [people] care too much: pretty printers [and syntax highligh-
ting, d.A.] mechanically produce pretty output that accentuates irrelevant
detail in the program, which is as sensible as putting all the prepositions
in English text in bold font.	-- Rob Pike in "Notes on Programming in C"