Re: PSA: glibc buildbot slave up for aarch64

[Siddhesh Poyarekar <siddhesh at gotplt dot org>]

On Friday 28 April 2017 08:30 PM, Carlos O'Donell wrote:
> It is better in the long run to mark these XFAIL, associate them with a bug, 
> and have a green board. The green board makes it immediately easy to identify
> breakage.
> 
> The XFAIL is the encoding of expert knowledge. We _will_ get to fixing issues,
> but we will do so based on priority order of the things we have in the bugzilla
> and things identified by the community.

My concern is that we won't get to fixing things urgently enough given
that technical debt repayment has not been a priority for us
traditionally.  That is not to say that nobody does it - we have fixed a
huge pile of issues over the years.  It is just that we don't invest the
kind of resources that we should and as a result a number of issues that
are of medium/low priority stay languishing in there forever.  The red
buildbot is hopefully enough of an eyesore to get to fixing things
sooner rather than later.

>> I would prefer if for now red buildbot statuses become release blockers
>> for 2.26.  Once 2.26 is released, any failure should either be
>> immediately fixed or the offending patch reverted.
> 
> Why? They might not be important things. Priority is what matters.

Sure, I can settle for that, marking low priority bugs that nobody cares
about and are probably not easy to fix anyway as XFAILs.  In that
context I concede that the backtrace bug fits that description.  Also in
this context, I'd rather keep the buildbot red for aarch64 to track the
backtrace fix because the patch is in review and the red status is again
hopefully an incentive to expedite the review.

In general though we need to be careful with what we mark as XFAIL with
the view of making the buildbot statuses green.

Siddhesh