Archive Reorg Episode VII: Follow Build-Depends

[Martin Pitt]

Dimitri John Ledkov [2016-02-10 20:32 +0000]:
> This would mean that the universe component will always be available
> to get build-dependencies.

I think that just opening up the wide pool of universe is actually
going to make things much worse -- IMHO this should become a new
component that sits in between main and universe, something like
"main-build". These don't need a full MIR review, but if all of a
sudden 1000 new packages want to enter there then maybe that *is*
worth a second look. So archive admins can promote "obvious" stuff
without fuss, but raise a red flag if things go really bad.

There is a lot of breakage in universe and we regularly remove
packages nobody cares about. If those are now suddenly 20 levels deep
in a build dependency chain of something in main (and this is not an
exaggeration if you look at maven, ruby, or haskell!), we effectively
commit ourselves to having to maintain that stuff instead of the bits
in main that we actually care about. And we all know how well that
works..


Dimitri John Ledkov [2016-02-10 21:22 +0000]:
> And looking at the bottom of:
> http://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-archive/component-mismatches.html
> 
> All of haskell and a bunch of other things are trying to enter main at
> the moment. So it's hard to estimate things for xenial, given how much
> is currently in-flux in it. with hundreds of things mismatched.

That's exactly what I mean! By doing this you now get into a trap that
your $critical_package (unity or whatnot) is FTBFS because it
transitively build-depends on the Haskell transition that's going on,
or the PHP 5 → 7 reorg, or possibly both. I. e. you render these
packages unbuildable and got into a situation where you have to fix
half of universe first.

Martin

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