[webkit-qt] The bot infrastructure and gardening.

[Alexis Menard]

Hi,

By reading the email of Simon about removing Qt4 I have seen there was
plan to move to Amazon EC2.

State of art of gardening Qt :

- Mostly Ossy alone is gardener, which is unacceptable. Apple made a
move towards improving their bots (when you see kling gardening it
tells you they changed something), Google is already pretty good, GTK
also, we need to be better. While at the summit people praised Qt bots
being green all the time I do think it hides a terrible truth : our
skiplist grows grows grows and nobody look after it which conflicts a
bit with trying to release a stable trunk for Qt 5.0. How many mails
we receive from Ossy complaining about quality?

- Their is a huge delta machine wise with what the bot is running and
what people use to develop. The bot runs Ubuntu, many of us run
ArchLinux/OpenSuse while some us run Ubuntu. It leads to results
different from what the bot produce and what you see and your machine.
We have encountered many many many times people saying : "it passes on
my machine but not on the bot" -> Added to the Skiplist because nobody
can really see what's going with the bot. Szeged tried their best to
provide a virtual machine but it was a bit of a failure as the VM
doesn't behave the same as the bot, and the VM behave differently
whether your run it on VMWare or VirtualBox.

- We don't have any gardening plan.

What could be improved :

- We need to make a gardening plan. We can't be serious about making
web browsers/APIs without improving our coverage. I know we don't have
much resources but I think it should be ok to have one person doing it
for a week and then turn. Really it's a week maybe boring but it's
once every long time (almost one time every two-three months). This
will make Ossy more free to do something else so Ossy can go back
proper coding. I can make that list if people agree. Also it needs to
be enforced (maybe reviews could be the exception).

- We need to be able to test/stress/break the bot environment. Today
the fact that none of us can mess up with the bot make it hard to
reproduce the failures of the bot that you can't see on your machine.
While I do understand (and we don't want that) that Ossy doesn't give
us the key to the bot, we still need to have one to mess around. So if
we are moving to EC2 could we create one instance there that would be
the exact clone of the real bot (the only running layout test, WK2)
and with a free access for devs? That would allow us to mess
around/figure out problems, come up with a list of things to do on the
main bot (that Ossy or whatever admin could do) and then we rollback
the dev instance to a clone of the main one and it gets free for the
next dev. This will allow every single of us to have the exact same
environment with freedom to test what's going on. I know Linode
supports cloning instances but EC2 supports it? Also Linode allows you
to rollback the VM to any state you saved before (so you take the VM,
save the state, do your testing, fix, then rollback for the next guy).

Also Ossy could you describe a bit that move to EC2? We're moving all
the bots there (I'm not sure the bots which builds only brings much
value but whatever)?

Thoughts?

-- 
Alexis Menard (darktears)
Software Engineer
openBossa @ INdT - Instituto Nokia de Tecnologia