[BuildBot] News and announcements

[Sergio Durigan Junior <sergiodj at sergiodj dot net>]

Hi there,

It has been some time since I set our BuildBot instance at:

  <http://gdb-build.sergiodj.net>

And I figured I could send a message announcing some news here.

New buildslaves
===============

First of all, I would like to thank IBM again for the old POWER7
buildslaves by new, more capable POWER8 VM's.  We now have one PPC64BE
and one PPC64LE buildslaves, both running Fedora 22.  Special thanks to
Tulio Magno Quites Machado Filho and to Edjunior Machado, both from IBM
Brazil, for all the help with the new VM's.  Much appreciated!

Now, we have the following buildslaves in our BuildBot:

  - One Fedora 21 x86_64 machine (owned by me; more expected to come in
    the next months)

  - One Fedora 22 PPC64BE machine (owned by Edjunior Machado)

  - One Fedora 22 PPC64LE machine (owned by Edjunior Machado)

  - One Fedora 21 s390x machine (owned by Mark Wielaard)

  - One Debian Wheezy x86_64 machine (owned by Mark Wielaard)

  - One Debian Wheezy i686 machine (owned by Mark Wielaard)

(There are also 4 FreeBSD buildslaves, but they are currently inactive.)

As I said, I expect to receive two more x86_64 machines in the next
months; I intend to install Fedora in at least one of them, because the
current Fedora x86_64 machine (owned by me) is struggling to keep the
pace with the other buildslaves.

I also tried to dedicate some time to put a buildslave on an AIX machine
(in the GCC Farm).  This was a request by David Edelsohn.  However, I
did not manage to compile GDB there, and after spending some time trying
to figure out why, I had to switch context to another task.  If you are
able to help with this, I would really appreciate.

Needless to say, we also welcome donations of new machines for our
BuildBot!  For example, we don't have an ARM buildslave yet, which would
be very nice.  So if you're interested in helping us, you can either
take a look at this wiki page:

  <https://sourceware.org/gdb/wiki/BuildBot>

Or contact me directly.  The more machines we have, the more we can test
GDB :-).

New notifications
=================

If you commit a piece of code that breaks GDB in any of the current
builders, you will now receive a direct e-mail from BuildBot.  This was
an old feature I had in mind, and Mark Wielaard put some pressure to
implement it :-).  The way it is implemented today, you will receive a
message for every builder that is not able to compile your code.  This
means that you can end up receiving lots of e-mails (currently, we have
24 builders).  While I agree that this may be annoying, well, breaking
GDB is also annoying, so consider this a punishment!  Also, it is not
uncommon to see commits that break only specific builders, so I think it
is important to trigger a new notification every time something bad
happens.

I have also enabled a new notification for when a buildslave goes
offline.  I decided to do that after having problems with buildslaves
that were unstable and required constant monitoring.  Now, BuildBot
automatically sends an e-mail to the buildslave's owner, notifying him.

New builders
============

Pedro asked for a new builder to test just the compilation of the new
--enable-build-with-cxx flag.  It is now created on:

  <http://gdb-build.sergiodj.net/builders/Fedora-x86_64-cxx-build-m64>

This builder just compiles GDB, i.e., it does not run the testsuite like
the others.

Doug asked me if it was possible to create a new builder to test things
with --target_board=stabs.  Unfortunately, we don't have resources to
create this builder on the x86_64 machines; I will try to create the
builder on the PPC64 buildslaves and see how they behave.

Problematic testcases
=====================

Efforts on reducing the number of problematic testcases are being done,
mostly by Pedro.  Thanks, Pedro!  Hopefully, sometime in the future we
will reach a state when all the notifications of regressions will
actually be trustworthy.



And that's it.  Just a remind, all the reports generated by the BuildBot
are publicly accessible on the gdb-testers mailing list:

  <https://sourceware.org/ml/gdb-testers/>

This is now a very high-volume mailing list, so be aware if you decide
to subscribe to it!

Other than that, I am looking forward to improving the BuildBot in any
way that the project needs (taking into consideration the amount of
spare time I have, of course).  My next steps are:

  - Try to fit the builder requested by Doug using the current resources

  - Update the existing x86_64 machine to Fedora 22

  - Get the new x86_64 machines and set them up for our BuildBot

  - Get the AIX buildslave up and running

  - Continue trying to convince others to donate buildslaves to us :-)

Any help is appreciated, of course.

Cheers,

-- 
Sergio
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