Statically detecting FTBFS with
edos-builddebcheck

Here at DebConf8,
after my
talk about Mancoosi, I
got in touch with several people interested in the QA implication
of the EDOS/Mancoosi tools.

Me and Ralf have for example been contacted by Ubuntu people
which are setting up theirs equivalent of http://edos.debian.net. A guy working
on a
mirroring tool made an interesting hack using edos-debcheck:
out of a mirror with broken dependencies he can mirrors a subset of
packages which do not suffer of the same problem.

But now to the more interesting development, following a
bug
report by Atomo and discussions with Lucas (the
RC-bug-filing-master), me and Ralf implemented
edos-builddebcheck. You can invoke it
on a pair of Packages/Sources package list, and it will
check whether some packages will FTBFS due to unsatisfiable
dependencies.

The results on Lenny main/amd64 as of today are, ... erm ...,

scary : 49 packages will FTBFS. The RC-bug-filing-master and
Ralf are working on filing them, "don't worry".

You can find edos-builddebcheck in the edos-debcheck
package, starting from version 1.0-7 (in incoming at the time of
writing).

Update yes, ATM
edos-builddebcheck does not know anything about P-A-S
packages, so there are some false positive. Still, 33 source
packages are proper hits.