[maemo-developers] Autobuilder needs fixing!

[From: Graham Cobb]

I know there is a bug report about this but I think it needs some discussion 
here.  The autobuilder is currently just too unreliable to be usable.

I am trying to build a GPE update for chinook and diablo.  Building GPE (for 
one OS) requires building about 20 packages, with several dependencies.  I 
have been figthing the autobuilder on this all day and I haven't succeeded 
yet for either OS (I only have three more packages to build for diablo so 
hopefully that will not take more than about another hour).

All the packages build fine -- I have not had a single real build failure and 
I am not expecting any.  But any time I submit a package to build there is 
about a one in two chance it will fail!!  The build problems are always 
failures to install the build dependencies due to the network/proxy problems.

My script handles dependencies by waiting (for a long time) between building 
packages which are dependent on each other.  So, it is also susceptible to 
the problem which causes the autobuilder to decide not accept uploads for 
long periods of time -- it was unavailable for about 2 hours this afternoon!

If we are going to rely on the autobuilder, we have to improve its 
reliability.  I believe that firstly that means it MUST run on the same 
system which hosts the repository and use local access to install packages, 
not a network connection with an unreliable proxy.  And we have to track down 
the problem which causes periods of inability to submit packages with dput.

What can I do to help track down the problems and get them fixed?

Graham