Re: Status update
> binutils: Crashes the Hurd mid-compile
Is this a crash whose details have been reported?
> gawk: Makefile bug
> jed: Depends on latex2html, which isn't installable
> findutils: Source failure
> elvis-tiny: Needs termio.h, which libc6-dev provides but libc0.2-dev doesn't
Anything that uses termio.h is usually very easy to convert to use the
POSIX.1 termios.h interface instead, and that is a better thing to use on
Linux as well.
> If you're interested in helping me get some of these to compile, let me
> know - I'd like to avoid duplication of effort (I cheerfully will let
> other people do any of the work they want to!)
Since you are building so many packages, it would be helpful if I could
look at an automated web page that tells me the status of each package,
and ideally lets me get the full output of the last build attempt.
> If there is are Debian packages that *compiles cleanly* that you want,
> please let me know. I don't have the time to chase source bugs right
> now, but if something is buildable, I will keep it up to date.
It would be great to have something automated to try new packages, if that
is not hard for you to do. What I have in mind is something that simply
attempts to build a package and records what happened. Then these would be
automatically classified into "built" and "failed to build" (and maybe
"built but with warnings" if you have some regex matching on the compile
output); for things that support "make check" you could try that too and
add another bit to the matrix in the output. For anything that builds
successfully, then a human can take a quick look at the build log and see
if it looks like it might really be usable, and then decide to actually try
it out; when a human declares an autobuilt package is actually usable, it
can be published. For anything that fails to build, then a human can take
a quick look at the build log and with very little effort decide from the
kinds of errors whether or not they want to make the attempt to fix it.
It would be ideal to have this kind of system processing a queue of all
source packages in the debian pool as new or updated ones arrive. It could
prioritize the queue, doing first packages whose previous source versions
were manually declared working, second packages that are entirely new,
third packages whose previous source versions autobuilt ok, and lastly ones
that never worked; or whatever the policy, but using those kinds of
criteria to prioritize. With that particular prioritization, some packages
might never get tried if there are always more important packages getting
updated. If such a system is set up and does a little bit of extra
coordination to farm out pieces of the work, then several of us can set up
hurd machines that spend their spare time working on autobuilding while we
sleep.
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