[OpenWrt-Devel] Proposal: change buildbot's build failure logic to be less restrictive regarding packages from feeds

[Hannu Nyman]

We have seen several times in the past few months that one non-essential 
package from feeds fails to build and stops the whole buildbot build. 
Yesterday it was "ola" from packages feeds, and in the past few months at 
least "python" from packages and  "ltq-vmmc" from telephony have done the same.

Examples:
https://github.com/openwrt/packages/commit/3505f198bbeacc1a447e77464c53e844b955d2a8
https://github.com/openwrt/packages/pull/423#issuecomment-59117415
https://github.com/openwrt/telephony/issues/2

It seems crazy to me that non-essential packages from feeds, which by 
definition are non-essential, can kill the whole buildbot build for a platform.

Normally a failing package gets marked "broken", but the build still 
continues. However, some packages from feeds seem to kill the whole build 
when they fail.

As far as I have been able to determine, if the failing package contains 
either a kernel module (kmod) or a "host section", then the failure of that 
package is considered so essential that the whole builbot build is halted. 
The package is not just classified as "broken package", but the whole build 
is really stopped.

I understand that a host section breakage from a tool, toolchain component or 
a core package in the main Openwrt repo may be reason enough to halt the 
build. Same goes for a kmod.

But when that failure happens to a package from e.g. telephony feed, I do not 
really understand why the whole buildbot build needs to be halted. The more 
we have packages maintained in Github by a large group of people, the more we 
will have this kind of accidental breakages by small non-essential packages.

I propose that devs would change the buildbot build failure logic so that the 
failing packages from the feeds would not kill the whole build. Failing 
packages from feeds should just me marked as broken. That might require 
splitting "package compilation" step 25 to two different steps, one for 
packages from the Openwrt main repo, one for packages from feeds. (or 
alternatively, the essential packages should contain an ESSENTIAL definition 
on the Makefile, or something like that, and the failure logic should take 
that into account.)
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