Five build fixes a day

[Colin Watson]

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 11:32:58AM +0200, Martin Pitt wrote:
> Colin Watson [2011-09-13  9:55 +0100]:
> > Please find me a real Ubuntu user who doesn't install some packages from
> > universe.
> 
> We all do. But ¬(fix all universe) ≠ (don't fix anything in universe)
> 
> I. e. I think there is a lot of cruft in universe which nobody ever
> looks at or uses. E. g. I just removed some hildon packages which
> haven't had any upstream or Debian/Ubuntu attention for several years,
> it's just a dead project. We also removed a lot of GNOME panel 2 based
> applets which don't work in GNOME 3 any more; porting them would be an
> inordinate amount of effort, and for many of them we have better
> solutions available now (e. g. mail notification applets and the
> like). IMO we are much better off when we remove broken packages that
> aren't maintained upstream or in Debian any more than spending lots of
> time trying to get them to build again, just for the sake of it.

I agree that those sorts of removals are fine.

I'm not sure that they represent the bulk of the remaining failures
(although maybe they represent the bulk of the time that it would take
to fix them).  But perhaps it isn't worth continuing to argue by
assertion at each other :-)

> > Honestly, though: most of the build failures are trivial
> 
> Yeah, maybe I have just been unlucky. I looked at
> vala-dbus-binding-tool (20 mins), valatoys (gave up after 25 mins),
> libsmbios (15 mins), honeyd (had a quick look, but far from "easy").

It does seem to be worth specialising.  The first libav fix I did took
hours of tracking down and reading documentation and figuring out useful
idioms for the fix.  The second was much quicker.  I've been skipping
Vala build failures myself, but I suspect somebody who knows the
language well could nail those quickly enough.

> > In the case of the 'ld --as-needed' bugs in particular, a lot of
> > those have never been filed in Debian, and since the packages in
> > question are primarily maintained in Debian, nobody with maintenance
> > responsibility ever heard about the problem.
> 
> Right, for those in particular the fixes should be sent to upstream
> right away, not to Debian, as it's not a problem that actually affects
> Debian (yet).

I think Matthias said that he'd like to turn that on in Debian too quite
soon, actually.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]