Builds stuck in manual-depwait state should eventually give up and fail

[Martin Pool]

https://edge.launchpad.net/~bzr/+archive/+build/497787

still in Pending mode after a month. I think this ftbfs, so why isn't it just failed?

[Celso Providelo (cprov)]

For the record, I've increased its priority (was 1020) and it got processed, dep-wait on 'python-central' which doesn't exist in dapper. I will investigate why they got stuck for such a long time in queue.

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

This particular build as you say is probably stuck waiting for
dependencies. But I would think after nearly a month you might as
well give up?

--
Martin

[Martin Pool (mbp)]

I don't think this is a duplicate. Rather, this is a report that for PPAs, after say one week in build-dep, the build should be considered failed.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

I would not be in favour of failing such builds. It's common enough in Ubuntu for something to be auto-synced prematurely which is just waiting for one of its build-dependencies to get through Debian NEW so that we can have it, or perhaps to be waiting for an Ubuntu developer to perform a merge. It's actively helpful for builds to stay in dep-wait so that they're easy to find, and it does no harm; in fact it's better categorisation than failed, which could be almost anything. I don't really see why the situation is much different for PPAs: dep-wait does no harm and is a clearer categorisation.

To be honest, I'd prefer this bug to be Won't Fix.