Statically detecting FTBFS with edos-builddebcheck

Here at DebConf8, after my talk about Mancoosi, I got in touch with several people interested in the QA implication of the EDOS/Mancoosi tools.

Me and Ralf have for example been contacted by Ubuntu people which are setting up theirs equivalent of http://edos.debian.net. A guy working on a mirroring tool made an interesting hack using edos-debcheck: out of a mirror with broken dependencies he can mirrors a subset of packages which do not suffer of the same problem.

But now to the more interesting development, following a bug report by Atomo and discussions with Lucas (the RC-bug-filing-master), me and Ralf implemented edos-builddebcheck. You can invoke it on a pair of Packages/Sources package list, and it will check whether some packages will FTBFS due to unsatisfiable dependencies.

The results on Lenny main/amd64 as of today are, ... erm ..., scary : 49 packages will FTBFS. The RC-bug-filing-master and Ralf are working on filing them, "don't worry".

You can find edos-builddebcheck in the edos-debcheck package, starting from version 1.0-7 (in incoming at the time of writing).

Update yes, ATM edos-builddebcheck does not know anything about P-A-S packages, so there are some false positive. Still, 33 source packages are proper hits.