Re: Build sheriff proposal ...

[Joe Shaw <joe ximian com>]

On Mon, 2002-03-04 at 16:08, Chris Chabot wrote:
> Well the discussions on this subject tend to run lengthy, but the main 
> point why people don't use the spec files of gnome anymore, is because 
> they more often then not, do not work ;-)

Yeah, it's a Catch-22: nobody uses them because they don't work, and
because they don't work, nobody uses them.  (As far as casual users
go... distributors don't use them because they have their own build
systems).

My point, though, is that you will always be fighting an uphill battle
with maintainers on the spec files, because none of them use them. 
Strictly speaking, they don't break the build, so they have a very low
priority, and I doubt that's likely to change by just asking. :)

> Setting up a tinderbox might be a good way to deal with broken ones. 

Jacob, who has been the de facto build sheriff, uses the tinderbox to
see when the build breaks.  Usually it's someone doing something
wrong/non-portable with Makefile.am (since automake is all magic) or
forgetting to add a file to POTFILES.in, or whatever.  If you start
building from the spec files, it'll promote them to that sort of
importance, and a build sheriff (and perhaps even the maintainers) will
be more likely to fix them... otherwise, what's the point of a red
build?

Anyway, if you're willing to maintain them, that's great news.

Joe