Re: Again the build is broken :(

[Phil Muldoon <pmuldoon@redhat.com>]

Elena Zannoni wrote:
>>
>
> Sure, the two things you mention are not mutually exclusive.
> However there is a cost to identifying broken builds too, and it seems 
> that Mark is drawing the
> short straw frequently, since he is usually the first to correct said 
> oversights. It takes away some
> of his time from development. 

I'll segway into distributed version control here, my favorite pet topic 
;) It's great for isolating people from other peoples commits, and the 
ability to locally remove (or re-pull) whatever patch-sets you like. 
This a good thing, if a patch is bothering you then remove that 
change-set, then pull it later when it is mixed.

OTOH I think we all try to keep a stable CVS HEAD, but sometimes things 
just slip. Anyway, old ground there but ...
> What I have suggested is that, like we used to do once upon a time, we
> stick with as few development platforms as we can get away with in 
> order to minimize the
> oversights. So if the platforms supported are FC6 and F7, let's stick 
> with those and make
> everybody's life easier. If somebody wants to add FC5 to the test 
> grid, please do so and contribute
> the tests results so that they can be uploaded. Any takers?

I don't think the platforms have changed much since the time you talk 
about. But then again, there are other concerns now and in the future 
for other growth platforms. We have a Debian package now that Thomas 
works on. Mike is/was working on a Gentoo version. Fedora, RHEL and 
other distros. The math gets scary when you take platforms * 
architectures. Add into that the changing dynamics of the kernel across 
those platforms, and the only sane way to keep track of these is a build 
host.

Ideally, in a hardware rich world I'd like to submit a job to a build 
farm so it could lint all this automatically. Especially when I work on 
CNI code. I don't see the build farm failing as a "failure" but rather 
"doing its job".

Regards

Phil