Steve Langasek <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Sat, Dec 10, 2005 at 06:53:47AM -0800, Blars Blarson wrote:
>> Again: what can I do with such a list? See the list below. > Changes to the P-a-s list should be sent to the contacts listed at the top > of this file (http://buildd.debian.org/quinn-diff/Packages-arch-specific). I have to admit that this is the one area of the buildds that I've found a little frustrating and/or confusing due to lack of communication. I co-maintain openafs, which builds a variety of arch-specific packages plus an arch-independent package with the kernel module source. OpenAFS upstream does not support arm, m68k, mips, or mipsel. It's highly unlikely that it will *ever* support those architectures; the kernel integration is non-trivial to do, and I've never heard from users of those architectures who are particularly missing AFS. (AFS is a little heavy-weight for the sorts of things that people usually do on those architectures, I think.) Now, the openafs package does immediately fail with a reasonable error message on the unsupported architectures and tags all the binary packages as only being applicable to supported arches, but it feels like a waste, every time I upload a new openafs package, for it to go into those architecture queues, make the buildds download and install all the dependencies, and start trying to build, only to have it fail. It's always going to fail, I know it's always going to fail, and while this isn't a huge waste of resources, it's at least a little waste. So I followed the instructions at the top of that file and requested a P-a-s entry, after asking people here what to do. No response. Hm. I wasn't sure what to make of that -- maybe this request is too trivial to bother with, it's fine for the builds to fail, and I should just ignore it? Or maybe my e-mail wasn't received? Or maybe I misunderstood something and this was the wrong channel or the wrong thing to do? I waited a while (my saved mail says two months) and asked my AM about it. He said that mailing them again was probably the right thing to do. So I went ahead and did that, providing the specific entry that I think should be used. No response (that was in August). However, I notice in the build report that m68k is now marking openafs as "not for us" (but the other arches aren't). Is this because of my mail? Because the buildd administrator noticed the error message? This is a really minor issue in the grand scheme of things. It's not RC, it doesn't break anything, it's really mostly cosmetic plus a minor resource waste. Now I'm feeling kind of guilty about bothering clearly busy people with a trivial request, and I probably really shouldn't send this message to debian-devel either, since certainly it's not any kind of serious problem that this hasn't been done. But I really want to learn. I want to understand what the right thing to do is. It kind of bugs my (probably overactive) sense of neatness to see openafs sit in those build queues and then fail rather than cleanly being skipped. If I should just stop bugging people, I'm happy to do that, but I'd heard from a few other people who seemed experienced that this is what I should do, so it would be nice to get a message that explicitly says "stop bugging us." Or, well, anything. Certainly I don't expect such a message even within a month for this sort of low-priority request; it takes me that long to get to my mail too. But.... Maybe the right thing to do would be to work out a way for package maintainers to provide input to their own P-a-s entries in some sort of automated fashion? It does seem like a package maintainer is generally going to know this sort of thing, and I hate to bother busy buildd maintainers with this kind of thing if I could do it myself. -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/> -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
