Proposed package blocking due to FTBFS

[Peter Robinson]

On Wed, Dec 8, 2010 at 8:50 AM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 2010-12-08 at 01:05 +0000, Bastien Nocera wrote:
>
>> And I'll go back to fixing actual bugs encountered by people instead of
>> random bot-driven bugs.
>
> every abrt report, ever, is an actual bug encountered by an actual
> person. They have to be sufficiently narked about the app crashing (and
> it really must have crashed) to click through a rather convoluted
> process (the first time, anyway) to send in a report.

Or 1 person submits a report 30 times each time with an incomplete
backtrace and then asks why you haven't fixed their bug yet which you
can't recreate or debug!

> so are all these bugs, for that matter: they're actual bugs encountered
> by Matt. The package failing to build is clearly a bug. Matt tried to
> build it and so encountered the bug. Where does it fail to meet your
> criteria?
>
> I agree it's a bit questionable whether we should block packages for
> FTBFS, but the argument can clearly be made; being self-hosting is
> obviously important for an F/OSS project. At some point it devolves into
> Stallmanite wankery about whether you can flash your mouse, but where
> exactly we should draw the line isn't a slam-dunk :)

I'm sitting on the fence on this one. There are packages built on F-12
that work perfectly well on rawhide that don't build on rawhide. What
about an instance where there's dependant packages. Do they
automatically get blocked too or do we go through another route of
FTBFS on those too? In the case of a leaf one it might be that by it
not building currently doesn't affect anything and the maintainer is
aware of the problem but needs the time to fix the issue properly when
he gets time. In this case the maintainer then has to jump through the
review process all over again to get it unblocked and then will likely
just not be bothered. I have this case with moblin-panel-media. Its
been dropped by upstream but people have shown interest in it
remaining so they don't need to have mono. It needs patches to build
but I've not had time to deal with it (see the issues with meego in
general atm) but I'm aware of the problem and will get to it
eventually.

Peter