Bug#830997: release.debian.org: Permission to consider dpkg-buildpackage -A bugs as RC

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

Package: release.debian.org
Severity: wishlist

Dear Release Managers:

Back in November I started to check and report each and every source
package for which "dpkg-buildpackage -A" fails.

Approximately 293 bugs so far have been filed about this issue:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?tag=binary-indep;users=sanvila@debian.org

Most of them (182) are already fixed and a bunch of the remaining ones
have patches available.


With this report I'd like to ask for permission to consider this as a
release goal for stretch. This way the bugs would be raised to serious
and they would be treated like any other FTBFS bug.

Making this a release goal would mean that each and every package in
stretch (once it's stable) would be suitable to be uploaded in
source-only form. I think this feature would be particularly
interesting for the security team.


If you agree on making this a release goal, I can think of two ways of
doing this:

1) The wording in this page could be modified:

https://release.debian.org/stretch/rc_policy.txt

Currently it says:

  Packages must autobuild without failure on all architectures on
  which they are supported.

Maybe adding "This requirement includes the traditional
architecture-specific autobuilders and also the "Arch: all" autobuilder".
or something alike.

2) Or maybe we could just state that "Packages must autobuild" implicitly
refers to all available autobuilders, but in such case an official
statement from you clarifying how the paragraph should be interpreted
would help.


In case this release goal is accepted, I'm open for suggestions about
how to proceed (for example, if a last warning mail should be sent to
the bug reports before raising severities, waiting for a week or two,
etc. things like that).

Thanks.