Re: scratch buildds

[Helmut Grohne <helmut@subdivi.de>]

On Sat, Jun 15, 2019 at 11:14:37AM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> Well, this is a false equivalence.  I explicitly designed Ubuntu's
> -proposed to be equivalent to unstable, rather than to a new thing that
> Debian didn't have.
> 
> (Albeit with some minor differences in detail: it's a partial suite
> rather than a complete one, migration is much quicker, and it's more
> firmly emphasised as something that's for machine consumption rather
> than human.  But the software that Ubuntu uses to promote from
> <series>-proposed to <series> is the same as the software that Debian
> uses to promote from unstable to testing.)

I think that you're hiding a major difference here. The "for machine
consumption" part is key imo. When the intended audience is a gating
mechanism, unstable is the scratch space tha Adam asks for. When people
have the expectation that unstable is being tested by humans and people
expect unstable to be testable without too much frustration, we seek for
other places to do pre-upload qa (e.g. salsa-ci).

This is also relevant when doing distribution-wide QA. While lintian
tends to be unaffected by breakage in other packages, build tests,
piuparts, autopkgtest etc. Tend to get broken every now and then. The
ftbfs bts tag somewhat helps with ignoring known breakage. Sorting
through the many QA results is a time consuming task. Rejecting certain
classes of failures earlier would help with reducing that load.

In my experience, a relatively productive filter is to only consider
those packages in unstable, that have some version in testing. Thanks to
the autoremover.

Helmut