It’s been a while since my last patches for GNU/kFreeBSD, and Christoph kindly took over the kfreebsd-* build daemons from me some time ago, but still: smile of the day. Thanks, Russ.

As already blogged by Riku, getting replaced by script is really great!

Until now, I’ve had a crontab fetching my supporting-very-big-mails (up to 100MB or so) mailbox every few minutes, and looking into my =incoming-buildd/ maildir on a very regular fashion. With some simple mutt maildir hooks, replying to a Successful log would trigger extracting the changes file from there, setting some options, like PGP inline signing, and the mail would be ready to go back to the buildd. That part was just about being a GPG-signing monkey, so really not a funny part.

Since we no longer have to worry about this boring and time-consuming task, I’ve switched to a crontab firing up 4 times a day, and I try to deal with all incoming mails at once. Coupled with the new filters (e.g. on out-of-date packages on the buildd status page), I started using my time to file FTBFS bugs again, so that maintainers notice their packages fail to build without having to wait for a non-happening testing migration.

After 10 days, the following mutt filter in =debian-bts/ lists 69 bugs:

~s "Bug#.*FTBFS" ~P ~d 01/04/2011-

(Subject contains Bug#.*FTBFS, mails from me, starting from 01/04/2011.)

Figuring out whether that’s due to another package’s bug, an outdated chroot, a temporary glitch, etc. might take some time; that’s why it’s a bit hard to stay on top of things; and when the backlog grows up, motivation to go through this tedious task can be pretty low, especially when one sees repeated mistakes. I hope the amount of (possible) use cases for #620686 will decrease over time; instead, I’d be very happy if maintainers could at least check what’s mentioned in configure.ac/configure.in. Keeping an eye on its diff between upstream versions should be easy enough. ;)

Being a buildd admin means one gets to sign successful build logs so that the built packages get uploaded from buildds to the archive, but that also includes filing bugs for packages which fail to build from source (Build-Attempted). Once that done, they can be marked as Failed, usually with a reason. A few words plus a bug number is usually convenient, so that people (maintainers, possible NMUers, other buildd admins) browsing https://buildd.debian.org/status/ can just click the bug number to reach the BTS.

There were a few packages in Build-Attempted for alpha, for which I reported some bugs yesterday, which explains the crossing lines on the following graph:

(That’s an edited version of the buildd stats for alpha.)

One has to be careful while filing bugs, since the severity depends on the target architecture(s) for which the package is failing, but also on its already being built there. Mostly, that boils down to serious for regressions (no longer builds) on release architectures, important otherwise. The only exception I’m applying is packages failing on all architectures due to obviously missing build dependencies, since they can’t be built again, even on the single architecture they’re available for (and we want to guarantee that doesn’t happen, we want to be able to binNMU them).

There are currently no packages in Build-Attempted for alpha, kfreebsd-amd64, kfreebsd-i386, and sparc (architectures I take care of), but I’m going to have a look at other architectures as well, since having portable software and reported (FTBFS) bugs sounds like a worthwhile goal.

(Disclaimer: this post is not about G.I.)

Graphical installer

Josselin posted his thoughts about g-i, and given at least the first parts sound doable, I’m tempted to have a look at dealing with the needed udebs. Never touched anything like this before, but oh well, one learns every day. Time to learn a bit more about X11 as well.

It looks like generating a new mini.iso (using d-i’s trunk) wasn’t that difficult, so hopefully once I’m done with a few udebs, it should be possible to add them to this image and make sure those are usable, at least when loaded manually.

Once that finished, gluing everything together is probably going to be another story, but hopefully that won’t be impossible.

Unrelated stories

• Thanks to DSA (especially weasel), kfreebsd-* now have DSA-admin’d experimental buildds. Aurélien took care of setting them up; they managed to go through all experimental packages, and bugs were filed accordingly. Some were just marked as failed, usually with “Needs porting.”, especially when there were no regressions with respect to what was previously built on those architectures (as a reminder: out-of-date means serious, uncompiled means important).

• On a related note, this buildd.d.o form makes it possible to browse the build logs for various suites. See the dda@ announce for details.

• It looks like I’m going to stop dealing with Java at all: #557230. Thanks to Gabriele Giacone for taking care!

• It also looks like I’m done with Python packages as well.

• A new module-assistant package got uploaded, which should fix issues with newer kernel versions (ya can haz detailz). I’m wondering whether backporting it through backports.org from time to time would be of some help to anyone? It is (or should be) directly installable in a lenny environment, but maybe people would like it to be directly available once the lenny-backports repository enabled? Mail/wishlist bug welcome if you want it.

• If you received some signatures from me lately… no, I wasn’t pretending I met you at LCA or whatever, but that was from Cáceres (Hi Penny! ;)). Key rollover being thought of.

Extremadura

• DebConf’9 timing was really nice, allowing for following talks, getting things done, and meeting people.

• Upper talk room’s speaker’s chairs aren’t as comfortable as they seem; First row seats are OK to sleep on, though.

• Guards actually don’t want people to sleep there, and can even chase people in hacklabs to make sure they go sleep in the right venue; Funny wake-up, with a lot of Spanish, and little to be understood (note to self: try and get some Spanish basics before being in the plane for Spain next time).

• Very sympathetic guard anyway, apparently (read: still in Spanish) saying how sorry she felt for that. And even hugging and kissing when one was leaving. Spanish people, you rock.

• Day trip totally rocked, as well as the formal dinner. Orga-team \o/.

• Totally in love with the Bosnian bid for DebConf’11. Let’s hope they’ll keep on doing a great job.

• Oh, and decided to get another NM. Very funny to sit next to each other and mail NM Q&A every few hours.

Packages

• I requested assistance for the src:graphviz package. While being a quite interesting technical challenge back when I started packaging various things, it is currently quite sucking my time, and I would really love someone else step in. I guess the RFH (#536245) will be turned into an RFA quite soon.

• Pabs orphaned Synfig-related packages src:etl, src:synfig, src:synfigstudio. Given I don’t currently plan to dive more into them, I don’t feel like I would do a great job by keeping on maintaining them alone.

• The same goes for src:luxrender. It’s RC-buggy but given I may orphan it as well, I’m not really keen on uploading a new upstream release to fix it. On a related note, I might have spent some time on the src:aqsis package but again, if one is not a very regular user, what’s the point?

• I’m also quite wondering what to do with Blender. Details can be found in my mail to debian-devel@.

It’s quite sad to let some packages go, especially some which are quite popular, and which have made me dream for years (graphics stuff interested me back when I first touched a computer already); But well, time is a scarce resource. :(

GNU/kFreeBSD

• Taking care of buildds is a really interesting experiment.

• The new wanna-build feature called edos-builddebcheck is really appreciated on kfreebsd-*; most of the time, I’ve been setting dep-waits because of missing and/or uninstallable packages. Now it seems that all that stuff is being handled automatically, and I only have to concentrate on the successful build logs, and on the failed ones due to needed porting, broken build systems, etc. EPIC WIN, if you ask me.

• d-i port seems to be on good tracks, and having weekly reports is great.

• We’re still waiting for util-linux in unstable but once that done, we should get hal (thanks to a close cooperation with both its Debian maintainer and upstream), which should make it possible to get a lot of packages from the X11, GNOME, and KDE stacks. Once that done, a status update might be sent to d-d-a@.

Would someone guess the link between:

• What mail client are you using?

• Are you around during the next two weeks?

After answering those, I’ve been offered to take care of the GNU/kFreeBSD buildds, which is yet another experience. \o/

Quite a good timing since I’ve recently tried to get involved with the GNU/kFreeBSD ports again, prodding maintainers, uploading fixed packages (usually thanks to Petr Salinger’s patches), or providing patches myself.