Buildd.Net

Some years ago the m68k port was in a very bad shape. There was just kullervo as a buildd for m68k and over the time it couldn't keep up building packages. There were roughly around 400 packages in Needs-Build state, when I read on the debian-68k mailing list a posting from Christian Steigies searching for help. Because my Amiga 3000 with 68040/40 was just doing dnet rc5 key cracking, I thought that helping Debian with the m68k port might be a more valuable effort for that machine than just cracking keys for dnetc. Well, Arrakis was then the second buildd for m68k and within weeks the backlog was brought down.
But over time the number of packages raised and the complexity of packages as well, resulting in new backlogs from time to time. So, over time there has been a sort of "buildd farm" for m68k established and a completely own infrastructure was used.

The precessor of these pages was first setup by Rick Younie and located on his buildd, named "bruno". Then these pages moved to a new public machine called "crest". In the meanwhile these pages became useful not only for the m68k porters to check the status of their builds, but also for Debian Developers and maintainers. From time to time a maintainer asked why this kind of page only exist for m68k and not for the other archs as well?

One of the reason might have been that the parsing and generation of the page took up to 10 minutes on crest - only for m68k. Due to this fact, Rick disabled this service on crest during autumn 2003 because it took too much cpu time away. I offered him to host this service on my service and so the page moved. First it was available under http://m68k.bluespice.org/ but then I registered buildd.net and .org later on, because we enabled the generation of buildd stats for all archs. On the new machine it took only 2 minutes - for all archs.

Well, the page became quite well-known and was referenced by other people and I'm happy that many Debian Developers appreciate this service as an additional source of information to buildd.debian.org.
Therefore, I invested some time to enhance these pages a little bit, made them more supportable by me and added some new feature such as buildd status update, new graphical stats and some minor improvements (f.e. you can now see how old the wanna-build data is from which these pages are generated).

Yeah, but why all this?
It's simple. Because during the years there always arose the same kind questions on the m68k porters list, like "Why is m68k holding my package to go into testing?", "Please rebuild my package xyz!", etc.. These pages try to give you (as a maintainer) a helping hand to find your answers on your own. www.buildd.net lists some buildd related texts such as from Wouter Verhelst or Michael Schmitz. And it tries to help you to find your wanted information as quick and easy as possible.
So, if you have some idea to make this even more usable for you, please let me know! :-)