testing migration aging and reproducible builds

[Chris Lamb]

Dear Ivo,

> > it would seem a little antisocial to block them from migrating to
> > testing when it was "our" fault.
[…]
> I guess a lot will depends on the impact of the delay. If the difference 
> in migration delay is small enough, then there would still be an 
> incentive to make packages reproducible, but it wouldn't create too much 
> of an issue if there is a temporary problem that makes some packages 
> unreproducible in a way the maintainer can't fix.

Getcha. Indeed, with a small enough delay I'm sure we could find the
right balance here and, as you later say, it can be tweaked over time.

> As with autopkgtests, we can always (temporarily) add overrides for 
> certain issues if development is being stalled by them.

Would it be a bad idea to include this a sidenote when we announce it?
Whilst I suppose I could have intuited that autopkgtest overrides were
always possible, I was not aware this was a thing you did in practice.

For somewhat-obvious reasons (!) you folks don't publicise this very
loudly but it might be worth explicitly mentioning it in the case of
reproducibility when it goes live as they are at-present more flaky
and unreliable, perhaps also highlighting that this stability angle is
a work in progress.

Anyway, all +1 from me, I was mostly adding the slightly-pessimistic
view on the situation so we had all angles covered. Here's to a
reproducible bullseye...


Best wishes,

-- 
      ,''`.
     : :'  :     Chris Lamb
     `. `'`      lamby at debian.org 🍥 chris-lamb.co.uk
       `-