Which distroseries should the Daily Builds PPA target?

[Jelmer Vernooij]

On Wed, Aug 08, 2012 at 10:23:14AM +0100, Max Bowsher wrote:
> On 08/08/12 10:10, Jelmer Vernooij wrote:
> > On Wed, Aug 08, 2012 at 09:56:45AM +0100, Max Bowsher wrote:
> >> On 25/07/12 11:06, Jelmer Vernooij wrote:
> >>> On Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 10:44:29AM +0100, Max Bowsher wrote:
> >>>>> On Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 09:20:51AM +0100, Max Bowsher wrote:
> >>>>>> Currently, the Daily Builds PPA attempts to target all distroseries from
> >>>>>> lucid onwards, which haven't been removed from Launchpad's recipe
> >>>>>> offering due to EOL (i.e. maverick).
> > 
> >>>>>> But, the Daily Builds PPA isn't exactly in good shape, and even the main
> >>>>>> 'bzr' package itself has been failing to build there for a while.
> > 
> >>>>>> I'd like to propose that we drop lucid and natty support in the Daily
> >>>>>> Builds PPA, leaving it with just oneiric and precise.
> > 
> >>>>>> Part of the motivation is because natty is currently where backport pain
> >>>>>> currently tends to start; but also, it seems fairly unlikely that people
> >>>>>> would want to run daily builds on something older than the current LTS
> >>>>>> or current or previous normal release.
> > 
> >>>> On 25/07/12 10:28, Jelmer Vernooij wrote:
> >>>>> I'd rather keep lucid and natty around, at least for the moment.
> > 
> >>>>> Fixing them isn't *that* hard, it's just that nobody has spent the 30
> >>>>> to 60 minutes doing so, and it'll be a lot harder to add them back later if
> >>>>> they are removed.
> > 
> >>>> OOI, who do you see as the expected audience for such builds?
> > 
> >>> I don't have a clear idea of who might be using those packages. In
> >>> the past we've had people ask about broken daily builds for older
> >>> distroseries, so I'd rather err on the side of caution.
> > 
> >> But we're not erring on the side of caution; we aren't even putting in
> >> the effort to fix the precise daily build of bzr itself, despite it
> >> being broken for over a month.
> > 
> >> I think we need to scale back the scope of what we're trying to do with
> >> the daily ppa so we can keep up with maintaining it in good working order.
> > 
> >> Unless someone can speak up with having an actual use case for daily
> >> builds on ancient Ubuntu series, why should we bother sinking resources
> >> into them?
> > 
> > It does seem silly to try to build them even if we're aware they're
> > broken. Perhaps we can just disable them rather than remove them completely, to
> > make it easier to re-enable them later.
> 
> How about removing the packages from the PPA (if they FTBFS, they're a
> distraction to anyone reviewing things needing fixing; if they didn't
> FTBFS, they're stale and misleading) but keeping the recipe definitions
> around?
That sounds reasonable to me.

Cheers,

Jelmer