Re: Please, minimize your build chroots
On Fri, Dec 16, 2022 at 02:15:13AM +0100, Santiago Vila wrote:
> Greetings.
>
> I'm doing archive-wide rebuilds again.
>
> I've just filed 21 bugs with subject "Missing build-depends on tzdata"
> in bookworm (as tzdata is not build-essential).
>
> This is of course not fun for the maintainers, but it's also not fun
> for people doing QA, because those bugs could be caught earlier in the
> chain, but they are not. This is extra work for everybody.
Speaking as someone who is doing a lot of QA work, for *build*
environments I would rather expand build-essential instead of doing
extra QA work that consists of manually adding build dependencies for
packages that are in practice anyway installed in all build
environments.
There are important real-world usecases where reducing the essential set
brings benefits, but for *build* essential there are not really benefits
that are worth the extra work.
>...
> Because people accept the default by debootrap "as is", chroots used
> to build packages include packages which are neither essential nor
> build-essential, like tzdata, mount or e2fsprogs.
>...
I am right now looking at #1027382, and the first question is how I can
make apt remove e2fsprogs so that I can reproduce the problem - it feels
like a real waste of my QA work to "fix" something that is incredibly
hard to break.
It has been practice for many years that FTBFS that do not happen on the
buildds are usually not release critical bugs, and I would appreciate if
this is followed by everyone.
It is not helpful if people try to force the few people who are doing
QA work to spend their scarce QA time on fixing bugs that only happen
when building on single-core machines or in non-UTF-8 locales or without
packages that are in practice installed everywhere, by making such
issues that are not a problem on our buildds release critical bugs.
It also opens a gigantic can of worms, since there is the even bigger
opposite problem that many packages FTBFS or are built differently
when built in an environment that differs from our buildd setup.
Adding Build-Conflicts for all such cases is not feasible in practice.
If people want to support building without tzdata, or cross-building, or
building for non-release architectures, then bugs with patches are of
course welcome - but none of these are critical for our releases since
none of these impact how packages are built for bookworm on our buildds.
> Thanks.
Thanks
Adrian
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