On Fri, 2006-01-06 at 15:31 +0100, Sven Luther wrote: > The less human intervention for drudge tasks the better, and it means human > intervention can be focused on where it is really needed.
I think this is important, as anyone here already reading debian-mentors would note ;( How it is implemented is another issue, however it I believe this is a Debian wide problem, not one restricted to ocaml-maint. So if some acceptable solution is found for the working of ocaml-maint team, which is passing quality assurance processes internally, but for which there is no Debian wide solution, perhaps a note of this can be passed up: I would consider it a small bug in Debian process if infrastructure needs to be built like this by a maintainer to work around weaknesses in the main Debian infrastructure .. and a very SERIOUS bug if, after doing that, some processes to correct the problem on a Debian wide scale is not initiated. IMHO: if a build tool is upgraded in a way which is supposed to build all previous sources .. not necessarily keeping the binaries compatible .. then the rebuilding should be automatically triggered directly by the autobuilder. There is no need for any of the packages being built to be inspected by any maintainer because they haven't changed. If in fact some new errors occur then it is either (a) the new tool is bugged (b) the packaging of that tool *incorrectly* said that it was upwards compatible with respect to sources and the tool packaging requires fixing. The current technique used here is clearly very VERY bad and entirely wrong. It prevents an end user rebuilding from source and relying on the dependency checking to rebuild the right things. If the autobuilder doesn't do that the end user can't either. In my view this entirely breaches the true Open Source philosophy that behind the scenes everything is source, and that the end user can rebuild from it at any time to ensure that their binaries have not been tampered with. [The archive of binaries provided by Debian should never be directly addressed .. IMHO this is a very serious design fault in the whole system. Instead those binaries should be viewed entirely as a transparent cache. This isn't quite the same issue as above, but they do seem related] The failure of Debian to do this correctly has recently resulted in a major disaster with ABI changes in C++ not being correctly reflected .. leading to huge amounts of unnecessary work. This should never happen again. Yet none seem to recognize that the reason it happened was necessarily due to a design fault in the Debian package management system. -- John Skaller <skaller at users dot sf dot net> Felix, successor to C++: http://felix.sf.net -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
