Bug#844264: release.debian.org: Please clarify "Packages must autobuild without failure"

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

On Fri, Dec 30, 2016 at 07:31:00AM +0000, Niels Thykier wrote:

> Thanks for your interest in this subject and for wanting to increase the
> stability of builds in Debian.
> 
> As Julien mentioned earlier, build failures are sadly not as black and
> white as one might want them to be.  Especially if it comes at the cost
> of blindly disabling all tests in the package.

Please note that I have never advocated for disabling *all* the tests
in any package, only those which make the package to fail (which,
I agree, is not always trivial to determine).

> That said, we should have the talk about what is "definitely not good
> enough" - it does sound like you found some interesting cases here.
>   But I do not think we have capacity for that talk right now in the
> release team (between an incomplete openssl transition and the BTS
> breaking causing britney to migrate tons of packages despite RC bugs).
> 
>  * Could I ask you to re-raise this issue again after the freeze?

Yes, I could, and will do.

Unfortunately, the upcoming soft freeze marks the point of no return
for packages that have been removed.

This will force me, to be fair, to downgrade some ot those bugs from
serious and try to resurrect some packages from their auto-removals
(I'm speaking about packages which FTBFS with "low" probability,
whatever that means).

So I'm going to do that in the meantime, but with a reminder to
interested parties that policy is still "must build without failure",
so that nobody takes my downgrades as official policy, and people still
try to make their packages to build as reliably as they can.

Thanks.