Re: Help requested: Packages which FTBFS randomly

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

On Mon, Feb 20, 2017 at 03:24:10PM +0000, Simon McVittie wrote:
> On Mon, 20 Feb 2017 at 10:41:49 +0100, Santiago Vila wrote:
> > You are somehow trying to equate RC-ness with "it FTBFS in buildd.debian.org".
> 
> No, I'm saying that a sufficiently repeatable FTBFS on buildd.debian.org
> is effectively release-critical whether Policy says it is or not,

Well, I don't really understand the "whether" part, considering that
Release Policy already says that packages must autobuild without failure.

> because if we can't build the package, we can't release it (or can't
> release security updates for it later, or both).

That's the problem, the excessively pragmatical approach to
buildability. For the release, we seem to care only about *our*
ability to build the package, but: What about the user's ability to
rebuild the package?

We don't just ship binary packages. We ship source packages that the
user might want to modify and rebuild (outside buildd.debian.org).

Consider an extreme case: What would happen if we can build the
package but nobody else could?

The package would have an implicit "build-depends: buildd.debian.org"
and it would be effectively non-free, as nobody else could rebuild it.

However, I can imagine some maintainers that would happily downgrade
the FTBFS bug below serious "because it builds ok in buildd.debian.org".

I don't think that's what we want.

Thanks.