[MIR] ninja-build

[Chris Coulson]

1) Availability

It's available on all architectures.

2) Rationale

ninja-build is now a hard build requirement for Oxide which is in main. As Google are explicitly disabling support for building Chromium with GYP's makefile backend**, it will also be a requirement for Chromium too (although Chromium isn't in main, yet). Chromium from the dev channel is not buildable with GYP's makefile backend, and Google have no plans to resolve this.

** see https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/build/+/9bc1c207a18ffa8284095d9350e835a4518870f6

3) Security

- No open issues
- No executables with suid or sgid bit set
- No executables in /sbin or /usr/sbin
- No daemon
- Doesn't open any ports
- Doesn't add plugins to security sensitive software, although it does provide bash-completion, zsh completion, vim and emacs plugins

4) QA

- Works after installing with no additional effort.
- Package does not ask debconf questions.
- No major long-term outstanding bugs. As this is the primary build tool used by Chrome developers, it would be reasonable to assume that there are people who care a lot for this.
- There is 1 important bug in Debian's BTS, but this is sparc specific:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=697268
- Upstream, there are 17 issues in the issue tracker that are marked as bugs. Out of these, 5 are Windows specific. None are particularly important, and don't affect its use for building Oxide or Chromium:
https://github.com/martine/ninja/issues?labels=bug&page=1&state=open
- The package is currently sync'd from Debian. It's at version 1.3.4, and could probably do with updating to the latest release (1.4.0) which is the version used to build Chromium. The current version does work fine though.
- It builds a test binary, but doesn't appear to run this at the moment. It does use a python script to create a bootstrapped ninja binary, which it then uses to build itself.
- Has a debian/watch file.

5) UI standards

- N/A

6) Dependencies

debhelper, gtest, python, asciidoc, hardening-wrapper, re2c, help2man, libxslt, docbook-xsl, docbook-xml, doc-main - all in main.

7) Standards compliance

- No issues

8) Maintenance

- Package will be low maintenace. The current release (1.4.0) is 8 months old. The previous release (1.3.4) was 3 months before that.

[Jamie Strandboge (jdstrand)]

MIR review:
* Does it FTBFS currently? build fine, with packages only in main
* Does it have a test suite? HACKING.md details how to run the testsuite, but this is not enabled in the build
* Does it have a team bug subscriber? no, it needs one
* Is the code translatable (if user visible)? N/A
* Does Ubuntu carry a delta? no
* Does it have a watch file? yes
* Is its update history slow or sporadic? Debian update history is slow
* Is the current release packaged? No. 1.4.0 is available but 1.3.4 is in the archive. 1.3.4 is the latest 1.3 version
* Will entering main make it harder for the people currently keeping it up to date? no-- syncs with Debian are expected
* Lintian warnings. Two issues:
E: ninja-build: copyright-should-refer-to-common-license-file-for-apache-2
E: ninja-build-doc: copyright-should-refer-to-common-license-file-for-apache-2
* Is debian/rules a mess? uses dh7 with overrides
* Errors/warnings during the build: yes, but only with documentation generation
* Incautious use of malloc/sprintf: spot-checking seems fine
* Uses of sudo, gksu, pkexec, or LD_LIBRARY_PATH: no
* Important bugs (crashers, etc) in Debian or Ubuntu: no Ubuntu bugs, one bug in Debian for sparc build

No need for security review.

Conditional ACK provided:
* testsuite is enabled
* a team bug subscriber is assigned
* bug filed in Debian on lintian issue (fix not required for promotion)
* bug filed in Debian on documentation generation errors during the build (fix not required for promotion)

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

- The testsuite is enabled now
- I couldn't think of an appropriate team to subscribe to bugs, so I subscribed myself.
- The 2 Debian bugs:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=750583
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=750585

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

I've subscribed oxide-developers to ninja bugs

[Jamie Strandboge (jdstrand)]

MIR team ACK. Please feel free to use ninja-build as a Build-Depends and upload. When that happens, a member of ubuntu-archive can adjust the overrides.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

I've closed this since ninja-build is in main now.