On Sat, Mar 12, 2005 at 03:12:12PM -0800, Steve Langasek wrote: > On Sat, Mar 12, 2005 at 03:01:28PM -0800, Thomas Bushnell BSG wrote: > > Goswin von Brederlow <brederlo@informatik.uni-tuebingen.de> writes: > > > > Remember that the buildd queue is not FIFO at all. The queue has a > > > completly static order. Any changes to the queue are just packages > > > hiding because they are not "needs-build". I consider that the biggest > > > flaw of all in wanna-build. > > > This is news to me. > > > It means that when one is told "just wait, your package will get > > rebuilt"; it is not necessarily true at all. There is no upper bound > > at all on time to wait for building, and that's a disaster. People > > should stop repeating the fiction then that "just wait" means "your > > package will eventually get built". > > Er, packages *do* eventually get built; they just don't get built in any > kind of FIFO order. Er, no. Unless there's some sort of aging process (not yet described in the threads here) which will result in an extra package called zappa in section x11 from eventually being promoted above a package aardvark in section admin, it is entirely possible that package will never be built. All it requires is for the rate of new packages entering the queue before zappa to be equal to or greater than the rate of packages leaving the queue due to having been built or removed. Practically, buildd admins can notice a longer-than-usual queue and throw hardware at the problem, and that seems to work well enough, and we could reduce the rate of package inflow through various means, but the problem still remains -- the queue prioritisation *can* lead to starvation. I'm not advocating that it be on the top of anyone's todo list to fix it, because we have relatively effective workarounds, but it's not healthy to say the problem does not exist, either. - Matt
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