[webkit-dev] The Purpose of Core Builders

[Brent Fulgham]

A week or two ago, Adam Barth elected to remove my WinCairo build bot
from the list of core builders. In the check-in comment, he noted that
the WinCairo bot rarely built, and was never green.

I do not agree with either of these statements -- the WinCairo build
bot had been green for a number of weeks after I activated tests
(instead of just building), and the bot generally builds properly (and
has done so for the past couple of years).

I admit to being lax in keeping the bot green over the past few weeks,
which was an unusual case due to external factors. I generally attempt
to maintain the bot every day, but was not able to keep close tabs on
it for most of October.

The build failures (which I fixed this afternoon) took all of five
minutes to correct, and were due to additions to symbol export files
that were not applied to the WinCairo version of these files. Surely
these small errors could have been corrected by the committer -- which
is surely the point of the build bots?

While I understand that a Red bot is annoying, I feel that removing
the bot simply masked the problem.

At the very least, I would hope that in the future that the build bot
owners should be notified if a third party makes the arbitrary
decision to remove a bot from the core set. The information is clearly
provided in the build bot configuration page.

Thanks,

-Brent