Bug#408256: Bug#406064: i386 binNMU for asterisk-chan-capi please

[Steve Langasek]

On Fri, Feb 02, 2007 at 11:46:43AM +0100, Lionel Elie Mamane wrote:
> Two possibilities:

>  - It works. We can't even reproduce the bug, except with a specific
>    binary that we cannot recreate from sources. Frankly, I'm clueless
>    what to do next then.

In that case, I think it would be reasonable to close the bug until and
unless it reappears.

>  - It doesn't work. What do we do? Have Mark upgrade random packages
>    (gcc, libfoo-dev, ...)  and the bugreporters try again, and loop
>    that procedure ad nauseam?

Er, no.  At that point, we would want Mark to provide information about his
build system so that others could try to duplicate it and reproduce the bug
-- Mark changing packages on his system is the absolute last thing you'd
want to happen if you actually want to pin the bug and know for sure whether
it's a bug in your package's build-depends/conflicts!

> So we can tag it as "moreinfo", severity "important" (because, without
> the severity inflation on my side to force this to be handled for
> etch, that bug is important at most because architecture-specific)

This is a wrong rationale.

- we have no evidence that the bug is architecture-specific, we only know
  that only one of the binary packages was confirmed to be affected.
- if *any* package in the archive is completely broken, that's still an RC
  bug, even if the binary packages for all other archs are usable.

It is ok to downgrade this bug here based on the lack of information and the
lack of concrete impact on the current set of binaries.

> and let it rot for a few years until it is irrelevant, fine. I fail to see
> how this is an improvement over closing the bug under the
> justification "Heisenbug, unreproducible, cannot be explained nor
> investigated, reopen if you ever hit it again and we thus get a bit of
> reproducibility".

There is an obvious course of investigation here -- find out whether Mark's
system can still be used to reproduce broken binaries, and take it from
there.  Before that's been attempted, it's simply false to claim that it's
unreproducible.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
vorlon at debian.org                                   http://www.debian.org/