[Piuparts-devel] Piuparts state-dependency-failed-testing analysis

[Dave Steele]

On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 1:21 PM, Holger Levsen <holger at layer-acht.org> wrote:
> Hi Dave,
>
> dropping the cc: to debian-qa at ...

Sorry about that.

>
> On Dienstag, 1. November 2011, Dave Steele wrote:
...
>> I wonder about a policy for retesting failed packages. The libreadline6
>> situation suggests that there is value in retesting failed packages on some
>> schedule as base.tgz is updated.
>
> see http://lists.debian.org/201107051044.04594.holger@layer-acht.org for an
> explaination about how packages are rescheduled.
>

OK, so errors of that type clear after a maximum of about 6 months.
I'm wondering about how many of these retries pass, and from that,
what an optimum retry interval would be, but I can let that lie.

>> Similarly, the latest release of my
>> package (gnome-gmail 1.8.2-1) is failing piuparts upgrade in wheezy,
>> because of an install bug in the previous release (1.8.1-1).
>
> whats the # of that bug?
>

LP #878494 - https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-gmail/+bug/878494

The failure was from a local test. I won't know if the server will
fail it till it hits in 7 days. I only bring it up as a possible
example of a situation where a good package can stay in a failed
state.

> is it worth fixing in stable?

Luckily (I guess), it didn't make it to stable.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-backports/2011/09/msg00032.html

...
>
> if packages depend on buggy packages, those packages _should be_ in the
> waiting queue. buggy packages must be fixed, thats the only way forward.
>
>

OK, but the examples were about possible cases where good packages
block others. I wouldn't have had a failure in wheezy if I had seen it
fail in sid (local testing was not working right back then).



The real answer, I guess, is to concentrate on the lib-gtk's and
readlines of the world. Some status:

dependency failed -  2199
failed testing -  253

blocking free cum  package
 453      39  2160 sgml-data     -
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=647473
 434       3  1770 docbook-xsl     -
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=647575
 238     142  1628 ca-certificates-java
 196     179  1441 texlive-base
 118     118  1323 iceweasel
  88      29  1294 gnustep-base-common
  83       8  1285 menu