Being a buildd admin means one gets to sign successful build logs so that the built packages get uploaded from buildds to the archive, but that also includes filing bugs for packages which fail to build from source (Build-Attempted). Once that done, they can be marked as Failed, usually with a reason. A few words plus a bug number is usually convenient, so that people (maintainers, possible NMUers, other buildd admins) browsing https://buildd.debian.org/status/ can just click the bug number to reach the BTS.

There were a few packages in Build-Attempted for alpha, for which I reported some bugs yesterday, which explains the crossing lines on the following graph:

(That’s an edited version of the buildd stats for alpha.)

One has to be careful while filing bugs, since the severity depends on the target architecture(s) for which the package is failing, but also on its already being built there. Mostly, that boils down to serious for regressions (no longer builds) on release architectures, important otherwise. The only exception I’m applying is packages failing on all architectures due to obviously missing build dependencies, since they can’t be built again, even on the single architecture they’re available for (and we want to guarantee that doesn’t happen, we want to be able to binNMU them).

There are currently no packages in Build-Attempted for alpha, kfreebsd-amd64, kfreebsd-i386, and sparc (architectures I take care of), but I’m going to have a look at other architectures as well, since having portable software and reported (FTBFS) bugs sounds like a worthwhile goal.