full archive rebuilds with package comparison?
Hi,
the problem discovered in http://bugs.debian.org/736426 can probably
checked for automatically. But I don't know enough about the
full-archive rebuilds (nor do I have time to dig into them ... as least
as long as there are failures discovered with piuparts) to see how this
can be accomplished (or maybe something like this is already being done?).
After building a source package successfully, a binary debdiff should be
done with the binary packages currently in the archive.
(What else could be done with the packages? Maybe a lintian run.)
I see three groups of differences that may be encountered by doing debdiffs:
* changes in the file list
- hmm, well, this needs to be examined carefully
* changes in the dependencies
- removal/addition of packages in Pre-Depends/Depends/Recommends/Suggests
- while I see this may happen in sid due to ongoing transitions, it
should not happen elsewhere and needs to be carefully analyzed if
on non-sid.
* tightening of dependency versioning
- if a version just gets tightened after rebuilding against some more
recent dependency, this can probably be ignored
* other changes of dependency versioning should be analyzed manually, too
For packages with binNMUs that probably means that the package has to be
built twice (a full rebuild generating arch and indep packages, like a
maintainer upload would do, and a binary-only rebuild with the version
adjusted to that of the binNMU in the archive.
If this scheme is working on sid, we should run a
full-rebuild-with-comparison of wheezy in wheezy to find other bugs like
#736426
(and maybe on jessie as well, especially for/during the freeze)
If possible, we should consider doing this for both amd64 and i386.
I might volunteer for analyzing debdiffs and logfiles ...
Andreas
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