> > Anything that uses termio.h is usually very easy to convert to use the > > POSIX.1 termios.h interface instead, and that is a better thing to use on > > Linux as well. > > Okay - Are maintainers typically willing to accept these changes?
I would think so. The termio.h interfaces are deprecated compatibility support on every system that still supports them at all. > > For anything that builds successfully, then a human can take a quick > > look at the build log and see if it looks like it might really be > > usable, and then decide to actually try it out; when a human declares > > an autobuilt package is actually usable, it can be published. > > Is the volunteer pool large enough to support this much work? This kind of automation leverages a small number of volunteers because it can take just a few seconds to glance over a log and decide that it's easy enough to be worth the trouble to fix a package you otherwise would not have thought about. It also lowers the threshold for new volunteers to do something helpful, because they can look at a lot of build logs of broken packages and choose problems they think they can handle. > I'd really like to get us to the point where we could consider > participating in 'testing'. I don't know what you mean by that; I don't follow debian goings-on much. > I also know that for many of the packages, I can't tell by simply running > it if it's functional or not. That's precisely what makes it useful to autobuild packages and classify them as "built but not tried". Then any volunteer can see this on the web page, get the package, and try it out to whatever degree they want to. Then they either follow up with bug reports, or report success back to you or somebody or other so the package can be reclassified as "really works". It's always a little bit useful to have a little bit of information, like that you ran it and it didn't crash outright but you don't really know that it is actually usable. So such things could merit intermediate an classification of "hasn't caught fire yet, but hell if I know", or perhaps just an annotation in the log so people can see a note about what you did or didn't try. > Libraries will be even worse. Well, for libraries you can tell by trying another package that uses the library. Which reminds me, it would be useful in the aforementioned matrix of package status to indicate packages we can't try yet because one of their dependencies is not installable yet.
