Steve Langasek <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Tue, Jan 10, 2006 at 11:08:14AM +0100, Frank Küster wrote: > >> It *seems* it has been fixed; but I don't know whether it has just >> disappeared, or has been fixed by human intervention, and if yes by >> which. Since the first may be true, it might as well reappear again. > > <sigh> No, buildds don't magically go from believing a dependency is > satisfied, to believing it's not satisfied, and back again. If the problem > has disappeared, it's due to human intervention.
Reverting the argument, this means that the buildd only believed the dependency was satisfied while in fact it wasn't after a human's intervention. I don't believe that buildd admins deliberately did this... There might have been some bug causing this, but hardware failures also sometimes manifest as apparently "random" behavior. And, by the way, I think that evidence is more for the view that it wasn't a complete package that was missing, but rather only particular files - at least this was the case previously when mysql-dfsg-5.0 failed. >> > or a bug in some >> > maintainer script or other; > >> How a bug in a maintainer script could have the result that installing >> an arch-all package fails because an other arch-all package is not >> there, and how this can happen on only one particular machine of one >> particular architecture, this I fail to see. > > Then you haven't been looking at buildds for very long. Fortunately not, since my packages hardly suffered FTBFSes, and the ones they caused where of a different nature. > Historically such > problems were unpleasantly frequent on buildds due to a combination of buggy > postrm scripts, and a bug in dpkg's rollback support when calling dpkg > --purge for a package in the "installed" state. I believe the dpkg bug is > fixed now, but a) I could be wrong, and b) there may be other bugs in the > world. Ah - can you point me to something to read about this? How can it be architecture-specific, or host-specific? Regards, Frank -- Frank Küster Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich Debian Developer