On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 11:42:14AM -0400, Don Armstrong wrote: > I'm imagining that buildd admins would then just file an FTBFS against > the package, the maintainer would see it, and say "I don't know why > this is failing; looks to be arch-specific", reassign or affects the > bug to the arch specific porter psuedopackage, and the porters now can > track the bug. > > If there aren't any objections here, I'll run this by the porters that > I can track down.
Architecture pseudopackages? Yeah, I guess that would work, too; but I think tags are preferable. Most of the things that we have pseudopackages for are things that aren't directly related to packages; i.e., having a bug assigned to both the pseudopackage and some other package is the exception rather than the rule. I feel, however, that in this case the same just isn't true; architecture-specific bugs are always in one particular package. Reassigning to the architecture pseudopackage will cause the bug to "disappear" from the main package, causing duplicate bugs to be filed. So that would mean they'd almost always need to be assigned to both the pseudopackage and the original package, which I frankly find to be a bit of a hassle. Additionally, tags have the interesting feature that you can limit a query by whether or not something is tagged in a specific way. "Give me all packages that affect powerpc or s390, but not any other architecture" could be an interesting way to hunt for bugs related to char signedness, which is going to be awkward using pseudopackages. The release team could use architecture tags in similar ways they now use their <release>-ignore tags: "severity serious or higher bugs that have tags for this set of architectures but not for this other set here are not in fact release critical, unless they also have the patch tag set". I think doing such things with architecture pseudopackages is going to be much harder. In short, I believe tags are the best answer here. (oh, and if you're going to add them, I'll buy you a beer. Two, if you also migrate the tags that I've described in http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2009/03/msg00015.html) -- The biometric identification system at the gates of the CIA headquarters works because there's a guard with a large gun making sure no one is trying to fool the system. http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/01/biometrics.html -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-project-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20100727170622.gp11...@celtic.nixsys.be