Updated archive rebuild results

[Scott Howard]

On Sat, Dec 4, 2010 at 1:41 PM, Evan Broder <evan at ebroder.net> wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 4, 2010 at 8:17 AM, Scott Howard <showard314 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Those two data points, combined, leads me to believe that there are
>> 400+ packages that are failing to build in Natty. Because of the
>> Debian freeze, we should not expect fixes to end up in unstable and
>> thus propagate to Ubuntu. Ubuntu would have to create diffs to fix
>> those FTBFS.
>
> I think your assumptions are a little off. Plenty of DDs are more than
> happy to upload fixes for binutils-gold errors into unstable. I've
> fixed at least one FTBFS where I knew the Debian maintainer was
> responsive by sending the patch off, waiting for it to be uploaded to
> unstable, and then syncing it back into Debian. No Ubuntu diff needed.

My problem isn't with the diff as much as there is work that needs to
be done, and it needs to be initiated from within Ubuntu since these
are not RC bugs to Debian until after squeeze is released. I'm not
saying there isn't coordination, just that if Ubuntu waits for Debian,
it won't get done until after Squeeze is released because DD/DMs
shouldn't upload to unstable unless there is an RC bug fix during
freeze. These FTBFS are not RC bugs to Debian Squeeze (but are for
Debian Weezy). Exactly as you said, you had to do the work to fix the
FTBFS - which is great, we need more of that. Diff or no-diff, we need
to do that 400 more times before natty.

I'm a DM that received a bug report from ubuntu with a patch, which I
immediately uploaded to experimental and requested sync to ubuntu.
Even if every maintainer does that, there are still 400+ packages that
need to be reviewed, patched, uploaded to debian (most likely
experimental), and manually synced to Ubuntu (since it is in
experimental). It is doable, we just need to be aware of it and get
started. My point is that if we don't put an organized effort into it,
a large number of packages won't be fixed in time for natty.

Cheers.
Scott