On Thu, Jan 25, 2007 at 01:23:35AM +0000, James Troup wrote: > unilaterally make the decision that they are or are not OK. If it's > the consensus of the release managers and the architecture porting > team that they want to use emulated buildds and/or cross compiling, I > absolutely will not stop them from doing so.
There's something slightly related here which, I think, needs discussion, too: Is it really optimal to have one buildd admin per architecture, and several architectures per buildd admin? I know your opinion on this matter is different from mine; but it has been nagging on me for a while, and I must get it off me. Note, though, that this is not meant as an attack; I want a sensible discussion about the topic, since I believe it's important. I do not believe it to be optimal that people who maintain buildd boxen for a given architecture are not in touch with the people who claim themselves to be the porters for the same architecture. I know for a fact that you're either not subscribed to the debian-arm mailinglist (since I am, and have never seen any post from you there); and If people like Wookey, who I consider to be one of the prime arm porters, say things like[1] The buildd people do usually reschedule things when asked, I believe, but there is (almost) never any direct feedback so it's hard to know if people who ask questions here are getting the help they need. then I feel that there is something wrong. Building packages is done for a port; I think the porters -- those who actually care about the port -- should be the first to know and be informed about stuff going on; the best way to do that is by involving them in the actual building process more than is now done for almost every port, except m68k. I have now been somewhat maintaining the unofficial armeb port by myself[2], partially also in order to be able to compare the differences between, on the one hand, maintaining a few buildd hosts as part of a larger team for one architecture, and maintaining a few buildd hosts as the only person doing so for a given port on the other. In my opinion, the differences are not as huge as they are often claimed to be: staying on top of failures is required in both cases, whether you're the only one or part of a team. Obviously it takes more coordination and communication to do it that way, but that doesn't mean it's impossible, as the m68k port has proven for quite a while now (the recent issues had little to do with lack of proper buildd maintenance, but with other factors). On the other hand, people often say on IRC that they find the m68k buildd team to be the most responsive of all; I do not believe this to be a coincidence. Don't you agree it would be wise to bring this topic up with porters of a given architecture, and let them choose whether they want to remain with the status quo or would rather prefer taking over buildd maintenance by themselves? I have the feeling (though I obviously can't be sure) that some porters and ports would actually prefer going ahead with maintaining buildd hosts by themselves. [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-arm/2006/09/msg00011.html [2] although it's not doing much currently, since ftp-master.debonaras.org has been down for a while, and I guess aba (who set it up and has root there, unlike me) has more urgent matters on his hands right now than spending a few hours figuring out what's going on with a rather important host for an architecture that isn't going to release with etch anyway. -- <Lo-lan-do> Home is where you have to wash the dishes. -- #debian-devel, Freenode, 2004-09-22 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
