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Re:Please stop breaking the build by Animats on Sunday March 15, 2015 @12:46AM (#9205406)
Welcome to distributed programming. Just because it works for one developer doesn't mean it works for the others, at least not until all the conflicts are resolved. One could have build systems which didn't permit a change to commit in the master branch until everything compiled and all tests passed, but Github isn't set up that way.

The build may also break because of a change in an external dependency.

Re:Please stop breaking the build by golergka on Sunday March 15, 2015 @08:50AM (#9206295)
> One could have build systems which didn't permit a change to commit in the master branch until everything compiled and all tests passed, but Github isn't set up that way.

If you use pull requests instead of commits, you can set up such a system to automatically run make test.

Re:Please stop breaking the build by ForHackernews on Sunday March 15, 2015 @02:38AM (#9205610)
> The build may also break because of a change in an external dependency.

It shouldn't unless you've been lax in how you specify your dependencies, or the library maintainers have been sloppy in what they claim for backwards-compatibility.

Obviously in the real world, both of those things happen.

Re:Please stop breaking the build by zeendo on Sunday March 15, 2015 @01:19PM (#9207212)
Package repositories go down too (Maven, RubyGems, NPM, etc...).

Unless by 'lax' you mean 'didn't check in your dependencies'...I don't think I'd call that lax, though.

Re:Please stop breaking the build by ForHackernews on Sunday March 15, 2015 @02:29PM (#9207456)
At my work, we run a local mirror/proxy for dependencies. It's polite because we're not hitting those external services as frequently, and it has the advantage that we aren't reliant on them to produce builds.