On Thu, Nov 22, 2018 at 11:20:25AM +0000, Holger Levsen wrote: > On Wed, Nov 21, 2018 at 08:37:28PM -0700, Sean Whitton wrote: > > What harm are the packages doing sitting in unstable? Distributing them > > does not have much point, but neither does removing them. > > the rather few people working on (fully and partly) automated QA have to > spend brain and cpu cycles on it
I guess I'm one of the people you're referring to here. So let me share my experience: For cross building I used to consider all of unstable. That turned out to be painful indeed for exactly the reasons given above. Now I consider those packages in unstable that have some version in testing and I no longer have that pain. That seems to be a great filter. I also performed one feature archive rebuild. Given the number of temporary failures, I ended up looking at each failure (not just feature failures) and filing the relevant FTBFS bugs. I regret not having ignored packages not in testing. What I found more annoying is packages being removed from unstable that recently were in testing. I sent patches and the corresponding bugs where closed by the ftpmaster removal. Not ftpmaster's fault. Let me draw two conclusions: * Maybe we should remove stuff from testing even more aggressively to reduce the pain for archive QA? * If archive QA gets painful due to broken packages in unstable: Ignore those that have no version in testing. It's an easy filter with little misclassification. Helmut
