Hi All:
I have been maintaining a contrib package which, unfortunately, depends on a non-free package, pgplot5, to be built. This invariably causes problems because contrib packages are autobuilt by the normal buildd network and some, not all, of the buildd machines do not include the non-free sources. The consequence is that the build fails completely.
I have circumvented this for most architecures by purchasing one of each different architecture (except for s390 and hppa) and just building the package on all of them and uploading multiple binaries ar a time. Nevertheless, the package is stalled in unstable becuse the remaining architectures are failing to build for the above reason.
I have asked for the non-free sources to be included on the buildds and this is not universally thought to be a good idea so I have come up with another suggestion. How about if contrib packages, which are after all not officially part of Debian, are moved off the official buildd network and onto the unofficial non-free buildd network?
It stands to reason that the non-free buildd network would include the non-free sources and so would be the right place to build the contrib packages. I have found this network to be quite reliable, in general as my non-free packages are built without any problems.
I rather like having 8 different architectures in my server room but manually building all the binaries each time I release a new version of my contrib packages is tedious.
I suspect that there might be others with the same problem. I would much rather not have to deal with non-free but the pgplot5 package is, unfortunately, unique and as of now there is no free replacement for it.
Cheers, Carlo -- Carlo U. Segre -- Professor of Physics Associate Dean for Graduate Admissions, Graduate College Illinois Institute of Technology Voice: 312.567.3498 Fax: 312.567.3494 se...@iit.edu http://www.iit.edu/~segre se...@debian.org -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org