Arch independent packages are only built on i386

[Andrew Hunter]

I am prompted to file this bug report as the i386 build machine has been taken up with rebuilding the ubuntu-language packs for the last 12 hours.

As far as I know, source packages that only contain packages with the arch 'all' are only built on the i386 build machine. In the case outlined above, a major PPA rebuild renders the system effectively inoperable.

A quick fix to this problem as I see it is to share the build load among all the available machines.

In the long run, it would be nice to see a system where one user can not totally monopolise the build system (but that is more a spec than a bug report).

[William Grant (wgrant)]

The langpacks have only got a few more hours to go, but have so far eaten the last 48 hours of i386 buildd time.

This isn't PPA-specific, though it's less of a problem in Ubuntu due to the extra i386 buildd.

[Jacob Peddicord (jpeddicord)]

I think this would be very useful in situations like now when the build queue is overloaded by a few days. If all-arch packages were built on the machine/section with the smallest queue, things would probably go through a lot quicker. It would make a difference between waiting a few hours and a few days.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

This has pretty much been fixed by implementing multi-architecture builders (bug 285206): builders now advertise support for all the architectures they're capable of building, and a large run of architecture-independent builds will therefore be distributed to all the i386/amd64/etc.-capable builders.

This isn't necessarily exactly what you asked for, as in theory there might be something like native ARM builders sitting idle which could also contribute. However, that's more subtle as allegedly "Architecture: all" builds often have assumptions of particular build architectures, usually but not always x86-flavoured. Bug 217427 tracks the more detailed work there.

In practice, though, what we have now is good enough for the scenario you mentioned. We have enough i386-capable builders now that even a language pack run is dealt with fairly promptly.