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Please do not idly mess with packages in state Building



Hi,

This morning, when I signed the mails from voltaire and malo, I received
one response from voltaire that said that it didn't have OpenOffice.org
taken for building, but that instead it was marked as Dep-Wait.

Investigating turned up that this was manually modified by a person from
the release team who really should've known better[1]. OpenOffice.org
takes over a day to build[2], and the last thing I need is for it to be
built twice because someone made a silly mistake.

It's not the first time something like this happens; there have been
several cases where I sign something like 20 mails in the morning, and
say 5 of them come back with "this package is already installed" or
"this package isn't taken for building by you, but by <other buildd>",
or something similar. 

I'd really like to request that if you're dealing with a package in
state Building, you be more careful. The whole point of wanna-build is
to avoid double work, but that's subverted if things like this happen.

Of course there are exceptions. If a package has been in Building for
weeks or months, fixing that is called 'cleanup', and absolutely
welcome. If a package is in state Building but has the wrong
build-dependencies or is involved in a transition or some such and you
don't want it to be built just yet, I guess that's okay too, but please
talk to us then, so we know what's going on.

In all other cases, please do not touch packages in Building and assume
that the build will work until proven otherwise, or go check on the
buildd itself what the current state is.

Thanks,

[1] This mail is not about finger pointing, so the guilty shall remain
    unnamed. If you really must, go look at the logs.
[2] Build started at 20090831-1340
    [...]
    Finished at 20090902-0009

    I.e., 35 hours and 29 minutes.

-- 
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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