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bug#65391: Acknowledgement (People need to report failing builds even th
From: |
Maxime Devos |
Subject: |
bug#65391: Acknowledgement (People need to report failing builds even though we have ci.guix.gnu.org for that) |
Date: |
Wed, 30 Aug 2023 13:50:25 +0200 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/102.13.0 |
[...]
Maxime Devos<maximedevos@telenet.be> writes:
The first part looks reasonable to me (though I would decrease 7 days
to daily or even hourly, as I don't see a point in the delay), but how
does the second part (removing packages) make sense at all?
I mean, if you do that:
1. Build failures happen (independent of whether you do that).
2. Hence, by doing that, the distro shrinks over time.
3. Leading to frustrated users(*), because the packages they were
using and which were working well were suddenly removed for no good
reason (**).
4. Leading to less people fixing build failures (because of the
frustration).
We could bump the expiry time to 180 days, or even 365 days (a full
year). If nobody opens an issue for a broken package in that amount of
time, it's probably not used much if at all and may not be worth the
maintenance burden.
Please read the subject line of the original message, subject lines
aren't just fluff.
Believe it or not, I actually did! :-) I was replying to the first part
of your message, where you mentioned you were against packages removal.
My reply was giving support to devising policy that would define when
it's acceptable to prune the distribution of broken/unmaintained
packages, which is tangentially related to the topic of reporting broken
packages. These are just ideas and if we decide to turn some of them
into policy we could write it in a way that would favor resolving
problems instead of just making them disappear.
OK sounds good.
[...]
If maintainers check that no new build failures are created, then over
time the total amount of old build failures becomes roughly zero
(roughly, because of occasional mistake and new timebombs).
You mean that the building vs failing ratio improves, right?
That too, but in relation to what I replied to, I meant what I wrote,
which is a stronger statement.
I'm all
for giving a best effort to keep as many packages as we have the
capacity to do, but at some point the Pareto principle kicks in and you
realize there's not that much value in spending 3 days trying to fix a
hardly maintained leaf package that has been failing to build for a year
or two.
[...]
The point is that this situation wouldn't happen if build failures were
addressed soon after their introduction.
If it is noticed that Guix has exceeded its capacity to maintain its
packages and needs to trim its package set to maintain the remaining
packages effectively, then while that's unfortunate and possibly
frustrating to users, I don't have any better option available, but the
original (^) proposal did not have this ‘if capacity is exceeded’
qualifier attached.
(^) In a new e-mail, 宋文武 has amended it a bit.
(It fails the ‘distro ≃ reliable packages’ property since packages were
removed, but with this approach, it could be a one-time intervention
with a promise to in the future try to stay within capacity, and future
package removals could have a nuanced deprecation policy that avoids
making the packages unreliable(*).)
(*) I was searching for whatever Debian's package removal policy is (as
an example to base things on), but I only found "apt-get remove" etc..
Actually I don't know if Debian has one, but probably I'm just looking
in the wrong places.
It's important _how_ it is trimmed. In the original proposal by 宋文武,
packages are simply removed for failing to build -- there were no
regards to how difficult it would be to fix the build failure, how
popular the package is (or would be if it built and people knew about
it), how useful it is, etc..
On that matter, I think it would be useful to set up a variant of
something like Debian's popcon, in order to have actual statistics on
what's popular (sure statistics would be flawed, but I'd think it's easy
to do better than ‘package fails to build -> unpopular’). I say
variant, such that it could also count packages that aren't actually
installed because they failed to build. (Maybe have separate ‘desired’
and ‘used’ manifests?)
(*) Sometimes upstream is really not with the times instead of
slightly out of touch, sometimes the broken package has a good
replacement and often security updates need to be performed before
they existed, but the ‘remove packages’ proposal is not limited to
such exceptions.
This is the kind of considerations that we could mention in a package
removal policy (basically mention it's a last resort thing).
If there is an actual nuanced package removal policy instead of ‘fails
to build -> remove it’, my objection pretty much goes away.
>> [...]
The text of yours I quoted was to provide some context as to what I was
answering to; I replied to the essence of your argument I synthesized
from it, not point by point as I agreed with it and it wouldn't have
added much to do so.
OK, but I don't share your optimism -- while I would (mostly) agree that
_currently_ most contributors are acting in good faith etc., I would say
that after the proposed change the frequency of such contributors could
easily decrease, because:
* the proposal has no actual ‘acting in good faith etc.’ clause, so
it's quite vulnerable to rules-lawyering. I mean, look at
difference between how I interpreted the proposal and between what
宋文武 actually wrote -- in retrospect I read too much in it and I
didn't even try to rules-lawyer.
* there is (indirectly) an incentive for breaking packages, because
the motivation for changing a package and the motivation for fixing
the consequences of that change are different. (Whether
motivation change <, = or > motivation fixing consequences depends.)
* there is little to no incentive for fixing packages you aren't
personally interested in
Maybe things would work out and people in it for self-interest also are
in do enlightened self-interest ... (I don't know which way things would
go.)
It's something I have encountered and pointed out (less explicitly) in
the past in other threads as well.
I think it's a common reaction when faced with a detailed text -- some
people may simply ignore it, feeling overwhelmed, or they may synthesize
the essence of it to keep it high level and the discussion more fluid.
I don't think it should be perceived as mean; a partial reply is still
better than none.
k, but I'm ignoring the 'common' part -- common does not imply good.
Best regards,
Maxime Devos
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- bug#65391: People need to report failing builds even though we have ci.guix.gnu.org for that, (continued)
- bug#65391: People need to report failing builds even, Andy Tai, 2023/08/27
- Message not available
- bug#65391: Acknowledgement (People need to report failing builds even though we have ci.guix.gnu.org for that), Maxime Devos, 2023/08/29
- bug#65391: Acknowledgement (People need to report failing builds even though we have ci.guix.gnu.org for that), Maxim Cournoyer, 2023/08/29
- bug#65391: Acknowledgement (People need to report failing builds even though we have ci.guix.gnu.org for that), Maxime Devos, 2023/08/29
- bug#65391: Acknowledgement (People need to report failing builds even though we have ci.guix.gnu.org for that), Maxim Cournoyer, 2023/08/29
- bug#65391: Acknowledgement (People need to report failing builds even though we have ci.guix.gnu.org for that), Dr. Arne Babenhauserheide, 2023/08/30
- bug#65391: Acknowledgement (People need to report failing builds even though we have ci.guix.gnu.org for that), Maxim Cournoyer, 2023/08/30
- bug#65391: Acknowledgement (People need to report failing builds even though we have ci.guix.gnu.org for that),
Maxime Devos <=
- bug#65391: Acknowledgement (People need to report failing builds even though we have ci.guix.gnu.org for that), 宋文武, 2023/08/30