Merge Review build step is redundant?

[Jima]

On Fri, 9 Feb 2007, Fernando Nasser wrote:
> When reviewing a new package one needs to assert if the submitted SRPM really 
> builds, so there is a step for the reviwer that consists in actually trying 
> to build the package.
>
> But for the packages of the "Merge Review" type, that are already built in 
> Core, isn't this step unnecessary?

  Yes and no.  While Matt Domsch's builds are very helpful as a baseline, 
I've found (accidentally) that they're not quite perfect.
  First, he doesn't do ppc builds.  I honestly haven't encountered any 
ppc-specific bugs (I've only done four Core reviews, though), and most 
reviewers aren't going to have ppc builders to test them against, so I'm 
not sure this is a particularly serious lack.  Oh well.
  Second: Unless I'm mistaken, he only built published SRPMs.  (Anyone is 
welcome to correct me if I'm wrong.)  While this may seem like nit-picking 
(it does to me, and I know better), it matters if a maintainer made bad 
adaptations to a package after the last release was published.  I have no 
idea how likely this is, but it did happen in one of my four reviews; I 
discovered a poorly implemented patch that made an inadvertant change that 
caused the build to fail.  (Oops!)  It was a completely understandable 
mishap, but I'm not sure anyone had picked up on it yet.  I only did 
because I did a CVS checkout, ran `make srpm`, and threw that against my 
buildsys.  Lucky catch.
  I don't think anyone is advocating doing rebuilds against the CVS copy; 
the only reason I did is because I got tired of leaching a bunch of files 
from Matt's stash. :-)
  I do strongly suspect that for 90+% of cases, Matt's builds are probably 
dead-on.  As usual, he's doing very helpful work.  Thanks, Matt!

      Jima