Bug#1092155: release.debian.org: Proposal for arch-qualification rule: Limit max build time to X hours

[Santiago Vila]

Package: release.debian.org
Severity: wishlist
Hi,
I just file a bug for the build times of riscv possibly being too slow (#1092153). Thinking about it in a more general view, I think it would make sense for Debian to require build times on buildds to have an upper limit for an architecture to qualify. My concrete proposal would be something like 48 hours.
I have not validated if all architectures can meet the proposed 48 hour limit, so take that proposal with some amount of salting. Nevertheless, this metric should be fairly easy to extract automatically from the buildd/wanna-build database.
 * Delays deployment of security fixes in all suites.
 * Delays testing migration (and thereby RC bug fixes) for packages with
   autopkgtests. After 5 days of build-time, even packages without
   autopkgtests get delayed.

If I was an user of a "slow" architecture, I would much prefer to have delayed security fixes
than not having security fixes at all.

Regarding testing migration, remember that we started with 10 days. I don't think that
waiting 7 days for a migration in some exceptional cases is a big problem.

For the normal "keeping up" cases, I assume that slow architectures should have
more autobuilders available to compensate for their slowness.

So, I hope we can think of other solutions before dropping an architecture for being "slow".

(Bcc:Niels, please reply to the bug address).

Thanks.

[Paul Gevers]

Hi,

... if I had still been a member of the RT, ...

Thanks for raising this issue, which no doubt was inspired by your work
in the team. I think you gave a great description here of the balancing
act we need to perform in our team. Obviously the limit lies somewhere
and thinking about where that is might be good. It's my feeling too that
the ballpark limit for yo-average-package should be around 48 hours.

Given that the porters expect the situation for riscv64 to improve in
the not so distant future and that riscv64 *currently* is much slower
than the other architectures, I'm not sure I want to dive deeper into
where exactly to draw the line, as I'm not going to codify it (soon) and
without code to check it, I'm not sure we already need to detail
everything out. We might not need to check on this in a while.

So, my view on this is: yes in general (exceptions possible) an
architecture should be able to build binaries within a reasonable time.
48 hours seems a reasonable time at this moment to me.

Paul