[arch-general] A suggestion for the devs regarding rebuilds

[Eric Bélanger]

On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 8:52 PM, hollunder <hollunder at lavabit.com> wrote:
> Excerpts from Brendan Long's message of 2010-02-09 02:09:13 +0100:
>> On 02/08/2010 05:50 PM, Allan McRae wrote:
>> > On 09/02/10 10:05, hollunder wrote:
>> >> Excerpts from Allan McRae's message of 2010-02-09 00:26:37 +0100:
>> >>> On 09/02/10 04:49, Xavier Chantry wrote:
>> >>>> With every big rebuilds we get new breakage stories. It seems like
>> >>>> it's the norm nowadays rather than the exception.
>> >>>>
>> >>>> I am wondering if it's really only the users that are to blame.. or if
>> >>>> Arch is also to blame. Or if Arch was supposed to be an elitist
>> >>>> distribution and is victim of its success.
>> >>>
>> >>> I think the answer to that is in the question: What did we do different
>> >>> previously that resulted in far less of these issues?
>> >>>
>> >>> My impression is that nothing has particularly change in terms of how
>> >>> rebuilds are handled.  If anything, the whole process has become a lot
>> >>> more streamlined and cases of missing a package rebuild are now almost
>> >>> non-existent.
>> >>>
>> >>> So the cause must be... A change in user-base? Maybe just an
>> >>> increase in
>> >>> user-base resulting in more people who think Arch should be done their
>> >>> way and not the Arch way?
>> >>>
>> >>
>> >> I don't know whether you (I don't mean you alone) are just being cocky
>> >> or blind or I don't know what, but I've seen this attitude all over the
>> >> place and I don't get it.
>> >> By this attitude I refer to the total ignorance regarding these serious
>> >> problems, bye developers and regular users on IRC or right here.
>> >>
>> >
>> > It might be being elitist, but saying so does not explain why there
>> > were not such big issues earlier in Arch's history.  Maybe the target
>> > of "competent linux users" does not accurately reflect the user base.
>> > So, should the target change or should the user base change?
>> I agree that Arch should stay focused on competent Linux users, but the
>> update process does have flaws. The fact that users can do incomplete
>> updates (because devs don't set dependencies strictly enough) is one
>> that I can think of. On top of that, no one wants to check the mirror
>> status every time they do an update, it's not unreasonable to expect the
>> package manager to keep things working.
>>
>
> Mirrorstatus doesn't really help you, I've played with it during the
> big upgrade because pretty much everyone just said something along the
> lines of: "look at the startpage, dumbass" and even a dev couldn't come up
> with a better practical suggestion and didn't know what the mirrorstatus
> info really meant.. It doesn't know when a mirror is in sync, what it
> presents to you is probably the last sync starttime or something similar.
>
> The only information you can get from the mirrorstatus page is
> when the mirror started its last sync and how fast the connection is
> more or less.
>
>

As far as mirror are concernced, we (the devs) are aware of the
problem and knew that the move of the rebuild out of testing would
create havoc on the mirrors. However, we are working toward fixing
that problem: http://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2010-February/015335.html
 So we shouldn't have these mirrors sync problem anymore.