[webkit-dev] The Purpose of Core Builders

[Patrick Gansterer]

Some of my thought on this, since I have the same "problems" with my WinCE bot:

1) Is there any real benefit in the CoreBuilders concept (since it's not used as intended as Eric already wrote)?

2) When we still want the CoreBuilder concept: Can we make the core/non-core transition without any SVN change? What about improving the buildbot-master, so that it dertiminates the core/non-core on the fly, by checking the last x builds? I don't like the idea of adding and removing the the bots to the "core list" all the time.

3) It's hard for non full time contributes to get informed about broken bots, if you don't watch the buildbot site the whole day.
   a) Maybe we can tell the buildbot to write a mail to the build slave maintainer, when the bot is broken. (It happened more than once that my bot was red for days, because I didn't get informed about it).
   b) I agree that keeping all bots green is not the task of the committer, but maybe someone should trigger the port maintainer to fix it. I have no idea about a general working rule, but as of my experience the committer simply "don't see" the problem. E.g. WinCE bot builds the interpreter version of JSC, which is a "core feature" and not port specific, but the commit author didn't see the break.

- Patrick

Am 09.11.2011 um 06:48 schrieb Adam Barth:

> I wrote up a wiki page that I hope answers your questions:
> 
> http://trac.webkit.org/wiki/Core%20Builders
> 
> Adam
> 
> 
> On Tue, Nov 8, 2011 at 5:09 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
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>> 
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