On 2023-08-05 17:06 +0200, Lucas Nussbaum wrote: > > I wonder what we should do, because 5000+ failing packages is a lot... > > Should we give up on requiring a 'clean' target that works? After all, > when 17% of packages are failing, it means that many maintainers don't > depend on it in their workflow. I still depend on this in my workflow, and it's very frustrating that a large fraction of packages are broken in this way. I'd love it if we had a bit of automation to tell people it's bust so they can fix it. Sometimes it is hard because build systems mess up your source tree, but a lot of the time it isn't. I have some sympathy for people who would have to do a lot of work to fight a build system that doesn't care about clean source trees if they don't care about them either. On the other hand it is a massive PITA when you build a package, and something breaks, and you try to build it again and it won't because the source tree has changed and the clean target doesn't actually clean. This happens way too often these days. As you say it's clear that a lot of people are not doing things this way any more, but a clean target that works still has significant value for various sorts of automated builds, and debugging stuff. Perhaps an alternative to keeping the clean target working for people who don't care about maintaining it, is some metadata to say 'this package can only be built reliably from git/VCS - the old debian stuff is bust'. Better would be a new git-only dpkg format of some sort with a new set of expectations. But that's quite a big piece of work. Just to be clear I don't want any of that. I want the existing tooling and packaging to work the way policy says it should, at least until it is agreed that policy has to change. Wookey -- Principal hats: Debian, Wookware, ARM http://wookware.org/
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