[Fedora-packaging] Re: smp_flags considered dangerous?

[Axel Thimm]

On Tue, Jul 03, 2007 at 07:01:01AM -0400, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Monday 02 July 2007 19:02:02 Axel Thimm wrote:
> > Like stalling a package entering Fedora for over a month due to the
> > failures not being reproducible on neither the submitter's nor the
> > reviewer's systems? Not to mention the lost man power?
> >
> > We don't gain much by triggering Makefile bugs. Most upstream projects
> > don't design their Makefiles for -j usage, it just happens to work 98%
> > or less of the times.
> 
> This sounds like "tribal knowledge".  This has come up enough for me that when 
> I have strange compile issues one of the first things I do is strip down the 
> compile flags and start adding them back in one by one until I reproduce the 
> problem where it happened in the first place.  Often times I even seek out 
> the smp flags and drop them.  So it would be good to have this "tribal 
> knowledge" documented somewhere for people to follow if they're seeing this 
> type of issue, and then we can cut down that month to something /far/ more 
> reasonable.

But you understand that the month of trials is about buildon the
Fedora builders, not on your own server or workstation? It isn't
really a sensible turnover to edit, submit, wait for being queued in,
wait for being built on all archs, get the response on failure, dig
trhough a web interface, find the logs, donwload them, comaper them to
local logs etc. Now add the fact to it that if someone else than the
submitter has some suggestion it needs first to get piped through the
submitter, who needs to <repeat all steps above>.

It's different if the problem is actually reproducable on your own
system.

What's the drawback of a general discommendation of smp_flags (not
talking about openoffice and friends)? A submitter waiting twice as
long in build time? Is that really a big drawback in comparison to
having packages break out of the blue? No Makefile project not
intended/tested by upstream for parallel builds is smp_flags safe, the
race may just not have been triggered yet (as in the case of vtk).

And if your build succeeds on F7 and start to mysteriously fail on F8
will the first thought be that the hidden make -jX bug hit you or that
something in the build environment is screwed?
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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