Re: Combining NOT_FOR_* and BROKEN_ON_*

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

Jonathan Perkin <jperkin%pkgsrc.org@localhost> writes:

> * On 2025-04-03 at 10:35 BST, Thomas Klausner wrote:
>
>>On Thu, Apr 03, 2025 at 10:29:52AM +0100, Jonathan Perkin wrote:
>>> My opinion is that BROKEN* is a solution looking for a problem, and I've yet
>>> to hear a reason why having it makes pkgsrc better.
>>
>>When I look at bulk build reports, I don't want to see the same error
>>again and again - it can be analyzed once, marked with BROKEN*
>>explaining the problem, and will not show up as a build failure in the
>>next bulk build, saving me from having to remember it, and other
>>people from analyzing the same problem again.
>
> Ok, so here the problem you are trying to solve is that you only want
> to see new failures.  That's a reasonable requirement!  I believe this
> problem would be better solved by improving the bulk build tooling,
> and having better reporting of new failures, as well as consolidation
> of existing failures so that we can identify when a package changes
> from being broken by one thing to being broken by something else.
>
> The issues with using BROKEN to solve this problem is that:

I am ok with a future move to some kind of tracking/scoreboarding
instead of or in addition to BROKEN.

I do think it's helpful to have comments in our Makefiles with links to
upstream bug reports, and BROKEN= makes a nice anchor for them.

(I think this discussion has shown that people see BROKEN and NOT_FOR as
pretty different.)