Re: buildd/porter/maintainer roles again

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

[Clint Adams]
> Shouldn't it be the responsibility of the buildd admin (if, for some
> reason, the buildd admin is not a porter) to notify an
> architecture's porters of any porting issues manifesting themselves
> in a package build?

You bring up the important topic of expectations on who is responsible
for what regarding porting of Debian packages to the architectures in
Debian.

I believe it is important that the separation of responsibilities
between package maintainers, porters and buildd maintainers is
described somewhere autorative, to ensure that the entire project have
a common understanding on who is responsible for what and hopefully
avoid or reduce the number of conflicts between package maintainers,
porters and buildd administrators.

To ensure the various ports of Debian to not put unreasonable strain
on package maintainers, I believe it is important that most of the
responsibility of getting a package working on a architecture where
the package have never built before is placed on the porters and
buildd administrators.  If this responsibility instead is placed on
package maintainers, I believe it is a good idea for Debian to drop
the lesser used architectures to ensure they do not slow down the rate
of improvement in Debian.

Those caring for an architecture (which I assume is the set of porters
and buildd administrators) need to be the ones responsible for
providing patches to package maintainers to get the architecture
working with a given package.  Of course this work need to be done
together with the package maintainers, but I believe it is
unreasonable to expect maintainers to spend time on trying to get
their packages working on architectures they do not care for, and am
sure it is the way to get Debian to throw out lesser used
architectures.

Happy hacking,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen