Five build fixes a day

[Martin Pitt]

Colin Watson [2011-09-12 16:02 +0100]:
> So: I am personally committing to upload fixes for *at least five build
> failures per day*, Monday to Friday, until such time as I run out of
> things I know or can teach myself how to fix.  My own experience is that
> I can do this and still have plenty of time to deal with other things in
> a working day.  If nine other people join me in this commitment, we
> should be able to clear the queue in under three weeks.  Who's with me?

I'm committing to three in the next three weeks, which should be about
one hour per day.

Fixing an FTBFS is not all that simple: I really doubt that all of the
fixes that were uploaded in the past days were properly sent to
Debian/upstream, have been tested with upstream trunk, and an upstream
bug/patch has been sent against trunk (if applicable). But if you
don't do this, you replace a queue of 600 FTBFS bugs with a queue of
600 merges for the next release, and the whole pile of work just keeps
being pushed over several releases. Or, more realistically, the
packages would just stay at their old version instead of being
autosynced with Debian (which will probably fix a whole lot of FTBFS
again, and also introduce new ones). 

> [1] If your primary focus is main, you may be tempted to say "oh, they're
>  in universe, so they don't matter very much".

I'm actually in that camp. I am not convinced at all that fixing all
FTBFS bugs in universe is time well spent. We don't even have enough
manpower to fix even the worst bugs in main. We have only 1/10th or so
of the required manpower to keep the whole universe in good shape, and
every manday spent on random universe packages makes our actual
products worse.

I do appreciate the license/security updates/etc. problems, but TBH
I'd be much more inclined to apply the lp-remove-package.py axe very
liberally towards the end of the release, at least for nontrivial
FTBFS/NBS cases. A much smaller and high-quality universe would be
more appropriate for the development power we can throw at it than the
immense package collection that we have today. Considering that we
also offer PPAs, third-party sources in software-center, etc., I think
that's a better long-term strategy anyway.

But just my 2 cents here..

Martin

-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)