Extremely poor quality of KWave's build system

[Thiago Macieira]

On Tuesday, 23 May 2017 14:37:25 PDT Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> Let me try to comment on the wording of this email first.
> 
> I think this is not the correct way to handle the problem.

I think the wording could have used a better version, but the message seems to 
be correct and to the point.

> If you can't get ultra-frustrated and then say "fuckit i'm banning you from
> CI", that lowers a lot motivation on the other side because you didn't even
> gave them the possibility of "defending" themselves.

Didn't seem to me like that. It seemed to me like a conclusion of "after hours 
trying this, I haven't been able to make it work. Please fix these issues and 
let me know when you're done, so I can try again and correctly configure the 
dependencies. Without the correct dependencies, the build simply can't 
succeed, so it's disabled for now".

> I think a more positive way would have been to stop before you get ultra-
> frustrated and say something like "I can't get this to work, please have a
> look, if this doesn't get fixed in X days we may have to think about
> removing kwave from CI".

And in those X days, what happens? Until Ben can look at it again, the build 
will continue to fail. So what's the point of keeping it in the build schedule 
if it's only going to fail?

> In essence "it's the same", but wording matters.

Yes, wording matters.

> On the actual problem, as a workaround, have you tried "apt-get build-dep
> kwave" or the "synonymous" command in whatever OS the image you're using
> has?

Sounds like a good idea, though there may be good reasons why doing it is a 
bad idea. For example, the dependency list may be too big (contains things 
that aren't needed) or may be lacking optional things that the CI should be 
testing.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
   Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center