buildd ordering: where to make a suggestion?
I apologize if debian-release is the wrong place to send this to. If
it is and someone would like to reply telling me this, a hint as to
where I should be reporting this to would be most helpful. Past
experience suggests that sending email to individuals is neither
productive nor helpful.
It's fairly clear looking at this excerpt from my "igloo" page that
buildd ordering is influenced by the alphabetical position of your
package. I know that there are other factors, and I remember having
read what the ordering criteria was some time ago (probably during my
NM period in 2004), though I am not quickly able to locate this
information. It seems to me that ordering should be influenced by
priority, number of reverse dependencies, and age of upload probably
in that order. The alphabetical position of the package shouldn't
play into it at all, except maybe as a tie breaker among packages that
have exactly the same upload time. The current system results in the
xerces packages virtually never rebuilding on all platforms within
their 10 days in unstable before being eligible to transition. The
less important dxpc packages, however, usually get rebuilt pretty
fast. For what it's worth, I uploaded xerces-c2 earlier than the
other of my packages that are still waiting to be built on alpha.
+-----------------------------+-----------------+-----------------+
| Package | alpha | m68k |
+-----------------------------+-----------------+-----------------+
|dxpc 3.9.1-2 |Built |Needs build (108)|
+-----------------------------+-----------------+-----------------+
|icu 3.8.1-2 |Installed |Installed |
+-----------------------------+-----------------+-----------------+
|libxml-xerces-perl 2.7.0-0-6 |Installed |Installed |
+-----------------------------+-----------------+-----------------+
|nip2 7.14.4-1 |Installed |Installed |
+-----------------------------+-----------------+-----------------+
|psutils 1.17-26 |Needs build (23) |Needs build (216)|
+-----------------------------+-----------------+-----------------+
|qpdf 2.0.2-1 |Needs build (24) |Needs build (217)|
+-----------------------------+-----------------+-----------------+
|tiff 3.8.2-10 |Installed |Installed |
+-----------------------------+-----------------+-----------------+
|vips 7.14.4-1 |Installed |Installed |
+-----------------------------+-----------------+-----------------+
|xerces-c2 2.8.0-2 |Needs build (235)|Needs build (428)|
+-----------------------------+-----------------+-----------------+
I'm sure I must be the thousandth person to make this observation. Is
there a pseudopackage to which I can report a bug? Maybe there's
already one there. I do realize that this suggestion is easier
described than implemented since the count of reverse dependencies is
not something that is immediately available. However, it seems that
having the upload time be available should be pretty easy, and using
that as a stronger sort key than alphabetical position shouldn't be
that hard.
I am not subscribed to debian-release, so please include me on
responses.
--
Jay Berkenbilt <qjb@debian.org>
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