The process of reporting broken builds is long and tedious. It's certainly fun (yeah, really fun) to learn the procedure to submit a bug report, check if everything is nicely human-readable, all the requested make confs and build.logs are properly attached, but, you know, there are too many bugs, and life is too short. Broken builds should be reported as simply as: "Building group/packagename has failed. Do you want to submit a bug report, so the package can be put in ~platform_keyword automatically? [Y/n]" => hit [ENTER]. Done. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: - emerge something - it fails Actual Results: - log in to bugs.gentoo.org - follow various screens to file your bug report - open a terminal - sudo chmod o+rx various folders containing your build.log - attach build.log (search for it, find the exact path, copy, paste, etc - attach make.conf (search for it, find the path, etc...) - add some descriptive text to the bug report - greet the QA team politely, say thank you for your valuable work, and goodbye :) - it's 2020 and you got another year older. - You feel like you submitted way too many of these, the world is still broken, and locomotives are still powered by steam. You're sure the world could be improved... Expected Results: Reporting broken packages should be as simple as hitting ENTER. This way, way more useful reports could be obtained and the overall quality would improve dramatically. Please don't just close this as WONTFIX. Steam engines are no longer viable and other distros collect bug reports automcatically. No reason not to do the same with Portage, as well.
little addition: by systematically collecting statistics from packages that fail building above a certain threshold, it could be possible to automatically try to filter out such versions from world builds, or even attempt to build packages that depend on these easily-broken ones, or even go smart and find out with simple statistics of more fancy machine learning which configurations and/or USE flags cause the most breakages (think of chromium builds which decide to fail after 15 hours of hard work and 1 extra m³ of CO2 in the air)
I agree, that this would be a nice tool to have. I remember a similar tool at debian https://wiki.debian.org/reportbug We have python libraries which provide most required functionalities for this script. Unfortunately this script will not be written by it self or by filing a ticket. If you read this and are interested in such a tool, start a new project with a GPL license. Ask on IRC #gentoo-dev-help, for hints. I am sure, you can motivate some developers to help you and to join. Please link the repository here, as soon there is one.