On Fri, Dec 16, 2022 at 02:15:13AM +0100, Santiago Vila wrote: > Greetings. > > I'm doing archive-wide rebuilds again. > > I've just filed 21 bugs with subject "Missing build-depends on tzdata" > in bookworm (as tzdata is not build-essential). > > This is of course not fun for the maintainers, but it's also not fun > for people doing QA, because those bugs could be caught earlier in the > chain, but they are not. This is extra work for everybody.
Speaking as someone who is doing a lot of QA work, for *build* environments I would rather expand build-essential instead of doing extra QA work that consists of manually adding build dependencies for packages that are in practice anyway installed in all build environments. There are important real-world usecases where reducing the essential set brings benefits, but for *build* essential there are not really benefits that are worth the extra work. >... > Because people accept the default by debootrap "as is", chroots used > to build packages include packages which are neither essential nor > build-essential, like tzdata, mount or e2fsprogs. >... I am right now looking at #1027382, and the first question is how I can make apt remove e2fsprogs so that I can reproduce the problem - it feels like a real waste of my QA work to "fix" something that is incredibly hard to break. It has been practice for many years that FTBFS that do not happen on the buildds are usually not release critical bugs, and I would appreciate if this is followed by everyone. It is not helpful if people try to force the few people who are doing QA work to spend their scarce QA time on fixing bugs that only happen when building on single-core machines or in non-UTF-8 locales or without packages that are in practice installed everywhere, by making such issues that are not a problem on our buildds release critical bugs. It also opens a gigantic can of worms, since there is the even bigger opposite problem that many packages FTBFS or are built differently when built in an environment that differs from our buildd setup. Adding Build-Conflicts for all such cases is not feasible in practice. If people want to support building without tzdata, or cross-building, or building for non-release architectures, then bugs with patches are of course welcome - but none of these are critical for our releases since none of these impact how packages are built for bookworm on our buildds. > Thanks. Thanks Adrian