Proposed package blocking due to FTBFS

[Orcan Ogetbil]

On Tue, Dec 7, 2010 at 12:01 AM, Matt Domsch wrote:
> I would like to propose blocking packages at the F15 alpha compose
> point if they have not resolved their FTBFS from F14 or earlier.  The
> lists may be broken down by when they last did build.  With 3
> exceptions, these 110 bugs are all still in NEW state as well, so they
> haven't had much maintainer love in quite some time (6-18 months).
>

The subtlety here is that a FTBFS does not imply the package is not
functional. A package may be FTBFS due to various trivial reasons,
e.g. the name of a BuildRequires has changed and the new BuildRequires
does not Provides the old one. In such cases, from the functionality
perspective, the package does not need a rebuild.

Note that I am not advocating keeping these packages unfixed. I wanted
to point out that things might turn ugly and might even trigger an
avalanche when you remove the FTBFS packages from the repo and then
the packages that depend on them will start to cry.

Orcan