[OpenAFS] buildbot and packages

[Troy Benjegerdes]

On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 04:06:12PM -0500, David Boyes wrote:
> > Just to say explicitly, while OpenAFS developers are certainly welcome to
> > use whatever techniques make sense to them, I am completely uninterested
> > in doing anything at all with any of those half-assed meta-build systems and
> > will not assist in using them on Debian.  I believe they're irredeemably
> > broken as designed and are hopeless for generating packages that actually
> > work properly and integrate properly with the rest of the system, and have
> > better things to do with the time I have available to work on Debian
> > packages for OpenAFS.  Other people's mileage obviously may vary.
> 
> Opinion noted. Still, *something* has to drive the process, and if that something can do more than one package format without having to write - and maintain - a lot of custom scripting, then there's at least something worth discussing there, given the recent project resource availability discussion here and elsewhere. I can't see how burning developer time creating a packaging tool is a smart use of resources when there are so many other things that need doing far worse. 
> 

So automated testing costs a lot, and thus may not be practical.

How about an effort to get nightly builds of master available on 
as many platforms as possible, and getting thousands of bored college
students to download, install, and test them?

Wouldn't that massive crowsourced testing effort be worth the time of
a single developer to make sure *some* sort of package, even if it's
half-assed, gets distributed? I can't think of much of anything else 
that has a bigger resource multiplation factor than a 'one click install',
along with some defaults to use a 'test.openafs.org' cell.