How does universe works?

[Stefan Kluth]

On Thu, 14 Oct 2004, Daniel Stone wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 14, 2004 at 10:15:58AM -0400, dave wrote:
> > This has been brought up a couple times, and I believe the answer was
> > something along the lines of the autobuilder sometimes choking on a
> > package (for various reasons), and it ends up not being packaged.
>
> If the autobuilder choked, it wouldn't go in.  If the autobuilder choked
> on a dependant package, it wouldn't even be considered.  You have to
> remember, this was all automatic. :)
>
> > You might give it a day or so, or maybe submit a bug report to bring it
> > to the attention of the developers.
>
> You can bring it up on the list -- patches are appreciated more than
> anything, of course, since universe is totally unsupported.

How about a special category "universe" in the ubuntu bugzilla (or perhaps
even a separate bugzilla) where any registered ubuntu user can post a bug
*and also* modify it, e.g. close it after a successful fix.  In this way
we would have a central place where to find problem reports for universe.

My anecdotal evidence with broken packages in universe is that most fixes
involve replacing a broken package with a more recent working version from
debian.  Real patches should be rare as most of them already happen in
debian/unstable.  The way to investigate this is to get the more recent
source from debian and build the binary packages on ubuntu.  When they
work you have fixed the problem.

BTW, does the ubuntu build system make several attempts at building a
package?  There may be other reasons for a package not building apart from
errors within the package, e.g. power outages, system crashes, spilled
coffee etc. pp.

Cheers, Stefan

---Stefan Kluth, PhD----------Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter-----------
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