On Fri, 2024-02-23 at 15:35 +0100, Agostino Sarubbo wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> TL;DR: tinderbox will skip packages with know failures
> 
> it's a matter of fact that on bugzilla there are hundreds of bugs that 
> tinderbox continues to reproduce.
> 
> That results in a waste of resources and time.
> 
> What was done to improve this situation:
> in the past few months I launched few tinderbox environments with the scope of 
> collect the known failures.
> These failures, that have an open bug, have been noted on a list. 
> When tinderbox starts, it queries bugzilla to understand the status of the bug 
> and in case of open bugs it passes the package names to emerge as 
> --exclude $PACKAGE
> That save a lot of time because emerge FOO --exclude FOO hangs immediately.
> 
> Imagine a scenario where a broken package has no DEPEND. The waste of resource 
> is very minimal.
> 
> Imagine another scenario where:
> - the package FOO is broken
> - the package BAR has 100 depend
> - the package FOO is a depend of BAR
> - the package FOO is at position 100 of the depend order
> 
> that results in build 99 packages for nothing.
> 
> In short the problem is not in the package itself, but when a lot of DEPEND 
> are involved.
> 
> This behavior, *that was already experimented in the latest few months* does 
> not change anything on your side.
> 
> The only con that comes in my mind is that when a version bump silently fixes 
> an issue and maintainer is not aware about that.
> The bug still remains as open and as a consequence, the package continues to 
> be excluded.
> 
> For this reason, please be pay more attention to open bugs.
> 
> As a side note, bugs are obviously categorized. For example a build failure 
> for a package FOO on musl, will produce '--exclude FOO' only on musl.
> Same thing for doc brokeness.
> 
> For this reason please expect less 'tinderbox has reproduced this issue with 
> version "${VERSION}" - Updating summary.' and not seeing anymore this message 
> is not a symptom of 'this is fixed now' ( https://bugs.gentoo.org/770889#c6 )
> 
> Failures regarding Modern C porting are excluded from this behavior. Instead 
> '-fpermissive' will be used to build as much as possible.
> Tests failures have also no influence on that, but keep in mind that packages 
> with known test failure(s) are not built by default.
> 
> Thanks
> Agostino
> 

You've made the right call here. Sorry for not fixing the many bugs you've
reported. It's not that I don't care, it's very hard to find the time,
especially for the musl and Clang ones. I certainly won't assume the issues
have magically gone away. Thanks for your continued hard work in this area.