Colin Watson [2011-09-12 16:02 +0100]: > So: I am personally committing to upload fixes for *at least five build > failures per day*, Monday to Friday, until such time as I run out of > things I know or can teach myself how to fix. My own experience is that > I can do this and still have plenty of time to deal with other things in > a working day. If nine other people join me in this commitment, we > should be able to clear the queue in under three weeks. Who's with me?
I'm committing to three in the next three weeks, which should be about one hour per day. Fixing an FTBFS is not all that simple: I really doubt that all of the fixes that were uploaded in the past days were properly sent to Debian/upstream, have been tested with upstream trunk, and an upstream bug/patch has been sent against trunk (if applicable). But if you don't do this, you replace a queue of 600 FTBFS bugs with a queue of 600 merges for the next release, and the whole pile of work just keeps being pushed over several releases. Or, more realistically, the packages would just stay at their old version instead of being autosynced with Debian (which will probably fix a whole lot of FTBFS again, and also introduce new ones). > [1] If your primary focus is main, you may be tempted to say "oh, they're > in universe, so they don't matter very much". I'm actually in that camp. I am not convinced at all that fixing all FTBFS bugs in universe is time well spent. We don't even have enough manpower to fix even the worst bugs in main. We have only 1/10th or so of the required manpower to keep the whole universe in good shape, and every manday spent on random universe packages makes our actual products worse. I do appreciate the license/security updates/etc. problems, but TBH I'd be much more inclined to apply the lp-remove-package.py axe very liberally towards the end of the release, at least for nontrivial FTBFS/NBS cases. A much smaller and high-quality universe would be more appropriate for the development power we can throw at it than the immense package collection that we have today. Considering that we also offer PPAs, third-party sources in software-center, etc., I think that's a better long-term strategy anyway. But just my 2 cents here.. Martin -- Martin Pitt | http://www.piware.de Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com) | Debian Developer (www.debian.org) -- ubuntu-devel mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel
