[webkit-dev] On the greeness of the GTK+ bot

[Gustavo Noronha Silva]

Hey,

Keeping the GTK+ buildbot green has been a real challenge for many
reasons, but looking back at previous discussions we had regarding this,
I think we have come a long way. Over the last few weeks we (mainly
Xan!) put some hard work on getting the bot green by fixing bugs,
opening bug reports, and skipping tests.

One of the issues we usually have lots of trouble with is patches
regressing our tests that people do not notice. We have had some good
experiences regarding this recently: a patch to modify how the media
tests were run broke all our media tests for the third time since we
stabilized them, but the change was backed out to be reworked.

The second one was the work to get shadows support in cairo, which
regressed 2 tests of ours. Because we were paying attention we were able
to quickly spot them, and the people involved could fix them before
their regressive nature was lost in time, and they ended up on the
Skipped list.

I would like to ask of people checking in changes that they try to pay
as much attention to our release bot as they are paying to Mac bots. We
will do our best to keep them green, but it gets very difficult to do it
when people are checking in stuff that breaks our tests all the time,
and not paying attention to them. In summary, I would like to see this
kind of behavior applied to our bots as well:

	https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29329

This "it can't remain like that; we need to either skip, check in a
platform-specific result or back out the change" would help us a lot.

Thanks!

P.S. I think it is important to note there are a number of tests failing
intermittently, mainly inspector ones, but that seems to be happening on
all the bots, so bear with us there =).

-- 
Gustavo Noronha Silva <gns at gnome.org>
GNOME Project