Re: [BuildBot] News and announcements

[Simon Marchi <simon dot marchi at polymtl dot ca>]

On 17 June 2015 at 14:09, Sergio Durigan Junior <sergiodj@sergiodj.net> wrote:
> 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
> GPG key ID: 237A 54B1 0287 28BF 00EF  31F4 D0EB 7628 65FC 5E36
> Please send encrypted e-mail if possible
> http://sergiodj.net/

Hi Sergio,

One thing that I would like to see covered would be Python 2 vs Python
3. Is there a builder that builds gdb with Python 3? It's not very
arch-dependent, so I think that you could build with Python 3
(--with-python=/usr/bin/python3 for example) on a single builder and
it would be covered.

Thanks for this whole effort, it's _very_ valuable.

Simon