On Tue, 09 Jan 2018 at 19:52:23 +0530, Chris Lamb wrote: > Just as one example, a timezone library that did not work properly > in timezones beyond UTC+0800, etc.
That's a bug, sure, but is it necessarily a release-critical bug? The answer is usually "it's up to the maintainer", whereas FTBFS on a reasonable system under reasonable conditions is automatically RC by policy, and even if it wasn't, FTBFS on a buildd whose architecture previously built OK has RC-like implications on testing migration. If we held, for instance, gcc to this standard ("gcc must work properly with all valid C inputs") then it would have a lot more RC bugs. Instead, we accept that, while a bug-free compiler would be great, we aren't going to have one any time soon, and expect the maintainers of other software to work around bugs with -O0 or code changes if they need to. A timezone library should be running its unit tests in lots of timezones whether it's on the reproducible builds infrastructure or not, but a tangentially related piece of software that happens to use a timezone library during build shouldn't be responsible for verifying that its timezone library works in all reasonable situations. (Note the weasel word "reasonable", of course - arguably our buildds are already unreasonable in various ways that make sense for compilation, but less so for testing.) smcv