[webkit-dev] The Purpose of Core Builders

[Eric Seidel]

Furthermore, it seems the only solution which (sorta) works for
keeping a port building is to have an EWS bot.  I recommend that any
port which wishes to keep its bot building add one. :)

A while back we disabled the SheriffBot's "you might have broken the
build" commenting in bugs and over IRC, as we deemed it too-spammy.
There has been some interest as of late in re-enabling such (see
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=70544).  This "build
protection" was only enabled for Core Builders.  It's possible that
such a distinction for "Core Builders" would still be useful in that
case.

-eric

On Tue, Nov 8, 2011 at 7:38 PM, Eric Seidel <eric at webkit.org> wrote:
> The Core Builders are a failed experiment (for which I am guilty).
> They were intended as a set of builders which when green would allow
> the CommitQueue to commit.  This was long before the CommitQueue knew
> how to commit when the bots were red (like real humans do).
>
> I know of no set of builders @ build.webkit.org which are consistently
> green (Core or otherwise), so the distinction is of little meaning
> anymore. :)
>
> I would vote we just remove the concept of Core Builders at this point.
>
> -eric
>
> On Tue, Nov 8, 2011 at 6:24 PM, Antonio Gomes <tonikitoo at gmail.com> wrote:
>> What makes Brent's statement even more understanable is that since the last
>> three weeks I've been waiting for a "green" state on at least a few bots to
>> land a test, and it simply has not happened. All bots, including Apple's and
>> Chromium's have been red for a while, and a "green state" spot seems like an
>> exception in this meanwhile.
>>
>> The bot that has been mostly green lately is Qt's (due to the hard work of
>> Ossy and his crew).
>>
>> On Tue, Nov 8, 2011 at 8:09 PM, Brent Fulgham <bfulgham at webkit.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> 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
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> webkit-dev mailing list
>>> webkit-dev at lists.webkit.org
>>> http://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/webkit-dev
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> --Antonio Gomes
>>
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>