At April 30, I took over maintenance of of Debian's kFreeBSD autobuilders. Means getting something like 4,5k e-Mails this month (gladly no need to sign all those 4k successful builds any more!), filling nearly 30 RC Bugs (quite a lot of which got fixed just within hours after filling, wow!), investigating some of the more strange build failures and such stuff. In general it turned out to be quite some fun.
Quite interesting which libraries turn out to be rather central to the Archive. I wouldn't have guessed that a uninstallable libmtp would prevent a reasonable fraction of the builds to fail -- including packages like subversion.
Packages builds failing because the disk space is exhausted may be something most of us have already witnessed, especially those here that use one of these small notebook hard drives. Build failures caused by a lack of RAM might certainly be imaginable as well, especially on highly parallel builds. But have you ever seen gcc fail because the virtual address space was exhausted on 32 bit architectures?
Also there's a interesting lot of packages with misspelled build dependencies which sbuild can't find and therefore can't build the package. Maybe having a lintian check for some of these problems would be a good idea?
I'm also regularly seeing build failures that look easy enough to fix -- like some glob in a *.install for some python package matching lib.linux*. I try to fix some of these as I see them but my time is unfortunately limited as well. Someone interested in quick&easy noticed about these kind of issues? I could put URLs to build-logs on identi.ca or somewhere on IRC.
There are also some really strange failures like llvm, which builds flawlessly on my local kFreeBSD boxes all the time, inside and outside schroot but hangs all the time in the same testcase when building on any of the autobuilders (any hints welcome!) or perl failing on kfreebsd-amd64 selectively but all the time.
