Bug#820416: kodi: FTBFS in testing (Segmentation fault)

[Santiago Vila]

On Wed, Aug 24, 2016 at 11:43:54PM +0200, Bálint Réczey wrote:

> I don't like having this bug, but if a program fails to build 50% of
> the time but runs fine it can be released IMO since users are not
> affected.

You seem to imply that our "output" as package distributors is just
the set of binary packages. That's not the case. We provide source
packages and binary packages. If a user can't build a source
package that we provide then he/she is affected as well, because
taking the source package and building it (possibly with modifications)
is also a way of "using" it.


In either case, it is not the severity definitions what we have to
consider here, but release policy.

Release policy says "packages must autobuild".

If policy said "packages must autobuild most of the time", then yes,
we could maybe have packages which only build ok most of the time.

But that's not what release policy says, and that's why FTBFS bugs are
usually reported as serious regardless of the "frequency" of the
failure.


In practice this is not as difficult to achieve as one might think,
because it often happens that it's the tests who made the build to fail.

If a test fails very often but does not mean that the package is "bad",
the logical thing to do until somebody has the time to investigate it
is to just disable it (as you have just done with kodi, thanks a lot).

Thanks.