Bug#710696: severity of 710696 is serious, because it's a FTBFS bug

[Santiago Vila]

On Wed, Sep 28, 2016 at 10:54:33PM +0200, Michael Biebl wrote:
> Am 25.09.2016 um 15:30 schrieb Santiago Vila:
> > I still think downgrading is wrong. It is your interpretation of
> > release policy that packages "must autobuild" only refers to the
> > official autobuilders?
> 
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=770193#37

Thanks for replying.

In the report above, the user was building the package as root. That's
unsupported and IMO it's not even a bug at all. I'm even surprised
that it's "important" and open. If I were the maintainer, I would both
downgrade to wishlist and close it.

In my case, I'm not building as root, and I'm not building in any
"weird" way, I'm using sbuild, which is what should matter here.

Since you quote release managers, I will do the same:

https://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2016/09/msg00341.html

Missing build-depends on gnupg (which is not essential, but it's still
installed in official autobuilder chroots) are severity:serious bugs.

We don't have to wait for this to happen on buildd.debian.org, so we
don't need a failed build log in buildd.debian.org for a FTBFS bug to
be serious.

Missing build-dependencies are not the only example. We file FTBFS
serious bugs all the time before they happen in buildd.debian.org.
For some Arch:all packages where the maintainer does not upload in
source-only form, there is not even a build log at all in
buildd.debian.org.

So: Can we already disable the tests that fail? Do you want help to
reproduce this for yourself? Maybe that would unblock this issue.
I could give you access to a machine in which this fails more than 50%
of the time. Would you agree to make this serious if you can verify
both the fact that it fails randomly (with such a high probability)
and the fact that my machine is not "misconfigured" or anything like
that?

(For the record, I have the feeling that this is more likely to happen
on machines having only one CPU, which of course it's still a
"supported configuration". I would try building in a machine with one
CPU for a start).

Thanks a lot.