suggestions for messages about successful builds

suggestions for messages about successful builds

[Janis Johnson]

As the person who updates the GCC 3.0 build status list I've got some
requests, some of which have been brought up by others recently.

First of all, please look at the list in the "Final Installation"
section of the installation instructions for information to include in
a message about a successful build.  Remember that your message will be
linked from the build status list and that other people who are planning
to build for the same platform are likely to look at your message, so
include any information that might be useful to those people.

If you didn't do a bootstrap, or if there were any errors in the build
or install, then it was not successful, so please don't report it as a
successful build.

Ideally, the build status list should not just be for successful builds,
but for successful builds of usable compilers and libraries.  Running
the testsuite is not difficult, although if you haven't done it before
you'll probably need to build and install dejagnu, tcl, and expect.
Once you've done that, they'll be available to let you test future
releases.  The test results are likely to include unexpected failures.
Some of these you don't need to worry about, but others you do.  I don't
know of a good way to tell the difference (apart from investigating each
failure) except to compare your failures to those on a similar platform.
You can make that easier for others by using contrib/test_summary to
submit your test results and include a link to that message in your
"successful build" message.

Active GCC developers can help by submitting messages about successful
builds on platforms they use regularly, with links to their test
results.

Janis

Re: suggestions for messages about successful builds

[Einar Karttunen]

On 27.02.02 10:29 -0800(+0000), Janis Johnson wrote:
> As the person who updates the GCC 3.0 build status list I've got some
> requests, some of which have been brought up by others recently.

I was thinking that there may be a simple solution which would
make your job very easy: add a rule to the makefile for building
such testversion of gcc. It would do the following bootstrap, test
and produce a report as a text file containing information for the architecture
configure flags and test results. It could even optionally support
mailing them directly to you.

- Einar Karttunen

Re: suggestions for messages about successful builds

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Janis Johnson <janis187@us.ibm.com> writes:
> First of all, please look at the list in the "Final Installation"
> section of the installation instructions for information to include in
> a message about a successful build.

It's not completely obvious where to look for the instructions.
Perhaps a "Testing Releases" section, with a link to "Final
Installation", could be added to contribute.html?

-- 
Lars Brinkhoff          http://lars.nocrew.org/     Linux, GCC, PDP-10,
Brinkhoff Consulting    http://www.brinkhoff.se/    HTTP programming

Re: suggestions for messages about successful builds

[gnat-dev]

On 02-02-27 10:29:59 Janis Johnson wrote:
| As the person who updates the GCC 3.0 build status list I've got some
| requests, some of which have been brought up by others recently.

| First of all, please look at the list in the "Final Installation"
| section of the installation instructions for information to include in
| a message about a successful build.  Remember that your message will be
| linked from the build status list and that other people who are planning
| to build for the same platform are likely to look at your message, so
| include any information that might be useful to those people.

| If you didn't do a bootstrap, or if there were any errors in the build
| or install, then it was not successful, so please don't report it as a
| successful build.

Yes, but it could be useful to report +failed+ builds also.

| Ideally, the build status list should not just be for successful builds,
| but for successful builds of usable compilers and libraries. ...

[snip]

=== End quoted text ===

I am also of the opinion (though a newbie here) that build reports
(successful or not) should go to the gcc-testresults list. If that is
not correct, then the GCC mailing lists web page is misleading.

== Buz :)

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