archive openings are not always fun (not forwarded issues, and ftbfs left over from the previous series)

[Matthias Klose]

Opening a new development series, syncing packages from Debian again, and having 
multiple entangled transitions ongoing is not always fun, but we need to handle 
that.  While working on those I see two kind of issues which could be improved.

Seeing an Ubuntu delta which is not forwarded to Debian.  When introducing an 
Ubuntu delta (which itself isn't a bad idea), it is not necessary to immediately 
forward an issue, and some of these fixes seem to be made during release times 
when people are busy.  It would be much simpler to sync an applied fix from 
Debian, removing the delta.

When we introduce new upstream versions, either by syncing from experimental, or 
by going ahead in Ubuntu, we don't fix, and we don't even check for regressions 
introduced by these changes.  It's easier to see and track when autopkg tests 
fail, but not so much, when the package starts to ftbfs, and the first time you 
discover and have to fix is, are unrelated transitions.  We have the ftbfs 
information in form of the test rebuilds, and this can be used to check for 
common ftbfs. Examples are:

  - recent glibc versions: removed header files, or newly implemented
    syscall wrappers.  These are one or two common error messages, which
    can be grepped for.

  - glib2.0/gtk syncs from experimental, deprecating functions. Again,
    a common error, which can be grepped for.

  - linux-libc-dev: A new upstream version usually introduces different
    issues, some may be general, but maybe not enough to grep for them.

I am also aware that introducing new compiler versions creates new ftbfs issues. 
  These are usually known in advance by doing test rebuilds,  explicit bug 
reports in LP for main, and filing issues for Debian.  Not perfect either.

Attaching a small shell script to download the logs for failed builds from a 
ftbfs-report.  Feel free to experiment what you can discover by just grepping 
the build logs.

Matthias
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