[webkit-dev] A bot-filled future?

[Geoffrey Garen]

A try bot would help me a lot.

As others have mentioned, being able to see output from build+test is a big deal.

I understand why you want to start with a Mac bot, and I applaud starting small. However, bear in mind that lots of WebKit contributors work primarily on the Mac, so they probably won't get any use out of a Mac try bot, and you probably won't get any feedback from them until the try bot expands to cover other platforms.

Geoff

On Nov 12, 2009, at 11:37 AM, Adam Barth wrote:

> As the project grows, we need to scale our processes to match.  In
> large part, that means automating as much work as possible.
> Commit-queue has done a good job of solving the "land patches from
> non-committers efficiently" problem, effectively removing that as a
> pain point.  I'd like to ask you to open your hearts and your minds to
> the idea of automating more of our processes.
> 
> Currently, I see the biggest pain-point in our process as the
> always-burgeoning pending-review list.  It's difficult to automate the
> process of accepting good patches because that requires attention from
> experts.  Instead, I think we should make it easier to reject bad
> patches.  As a first step, I've started extending bugzilla-tool to be
> a try server in <https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31422>.
> Here's how this might work:
> 
> 1) Contributor posts patch for review.
> 2) Committer marks patch with the try? flag.
> 3) The try-queue downloads, applies, builds, and tests the patch.
> 4) If all systems are go, the try-queue marks the patch as try+.
> Otherwise, it marks the patch as try- with an explanation of what went
> wrong.
> 
> The try-queue will be purely optional and advisory.  Hopefully a try-
> notation will encourage the contributor to post a new version of the
> patch that passes the try-queue.
> 
> Further down the road, one can also imagine another bot that automates
> step (2) by scanning the pending-review list for untried patches and
> marking them as try? when the try-queue has unused bandwidth.
> 
> Adam
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