Re: buildd/porter/maintainer roles again
On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 11:42:14AM -0400, Don Armstrong wrote:
> I'm imagining that buildd admins would then just file an FTBFS against
> the package, the maintainer would see it, and say "I don't know why
> this is failing; looks to be arch-specific", reassign or affects the
> bug to the arch specific porter psuedopackage, and the porters now can
> track the bug.
>
> If there aren't any objections here, I'll run this by the porters that
> I can track down.
Architecture pseudopackages? Yeah, I guess that would work, too; but I
think tags are preferable. Most of the things that we have
pseudopackages for are things that aren't directly related to packages;
i.e., having a bug assigned to both the pseudopackage and some other
package is the exception rather than the rule.
I feel, however, that in this case the same just isn't true;
architecture-specific bugs are always in one particular package.
Reassigning to the architecture pseudopackage will cause the bug to
"disappear" from the main package, causing duplicate bugs to be filed.
So that would mean they'd almost always need to be assigned to both the
pseudopackage and the original package, which I frankly find to be a bit
of a hassle.
Additionally, tags have the interesting feature that you can limit a
query by whether or not something is tagged in a specific way. "Give me
all packages that affect powerpc or s390, but not any other
architecture" could be an interesting way to hunt for bugs related to
char signedness, which is going to be awkward using pseudopackages. The
release team could use architecture tags in similar ways they now use
their <release>-ignore tags: "severity serious or higher bugs that have
tags for this set of architectures but not for this other set here are
not in fact release critical, unless they also have the patch tag set".
I think doing such things with architecture pseudopackages is going to
be much harder.
In short, I believe tags are the best answer here.
(oh, and if you're going to add them, I'll buy you a beer. Two, if you
also migrate the tags that I've described in
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2009/03/msg00015.html)
--
The biometric identification system at the gates of the CIA headquarters
works because there's a guard with a large gun making sure no one is
trying to fool the system.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/01/biometrics.html
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