Is the push window too big?

[Michael Schwendt]

I think this just broke two build jobs:

| Executing /usr/sbin/mock-helper yum --installroot /var/lib/mock/fedora-5-i386-core-e4c5db6c7c922589d8995bf76b50bcc08e68b049/root install  'zlib-devel' 'texi2html' 'compat-gcc-32' 'SDL-devel'
| http://buildsys.fedoraproject.org/plague-results/fedora-5-extras/nx/1.5.0-9.fc5/i386/nx-1.5.0-9.fc5.i386.rpm: [Errno 4] IOError: HTTP Error 404: Not Found
| Trying other mirror.
| Error: failure: nx/1.5.0-9.fc5/i386/nx-1.5.0-9.fc5.i386.rpm from local: [Errno 256] No more mirrors to try.
| Cleaning up...

Am I misinterpreting this, or did this build job fail because the package
had been moved away shortly before the job was queued?

When I logged into extras64 to sign and push pending builds, the
build-status page did not list any running jobs. However, the time it
takes to run repomanage, createrepo, repoview and sync the results to the
master repository is far too long. It looks like above "qemu" job was
started shortly after I had started the push. The push is still in
progress while I type this. Especially repoview takes a lot of time, and
it is also run for debuginfo packages. (why? is this really worthwhile?)

Which repositories do the build servers pull packages from?

What options do we have to improve this?

 - We could modify the push script to _copy_ files instead of moving them.
Successfully copied packages would be marked [in their package root
directory] and would not be removed prior to a successful sync.

 - I've heard there is a new createrepo version which makes backups of
other files in the repodata directory. With it, we would not lose the
repoview directory and could sync twice (once after running createrepo,
second time after updating the repoview pages). The first sync would cause
the new packages to show up in the master repository much sooner.

 - One good thing about the new push script is that it mails the build
report only after a successful sync, i.e. when the master repository is
up-to-date. Is this the only notification for packagers that they can use
to decide when to re-queue their build jobs?