buildbot status

[Roland McGrath <roland at hack dot frob dot com>]

I've just created a new Bugzilla component called "buildbot".  I decided it
would be useful to have this as distinct from the "admin" catch-all so that
someone interested in improving the bot situation could have a clear queue
of items to look at.  I added a mention of the component on the Buildbot
wiki page.  That wiki page could still use some more love.

Not filed in Bugzilla, but now fixed on the bots, is an issue that Tulio
raised a while back and that has been making the i686 and x86_64 builds
essentially useless for some months now.

The i686 and x86_64 builders were both stuck because I'd left changes in
their working directories from past manual debugging attempts.  This was
making the git commands in the "sync" step do basically nothing, causing
the "sync" step to show up as red but not preventing the build and test
steps from proceeding with a source directory that wasn't getting updated.
I've now made the "sync" step more robust to such local turds so it
aggressively wipes out everything from the source directory except exactly
what's in the git trunk.

I filed https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=19760 for the other
issue that Tulio raised, which is races between bot slave triggers and more
commits coming in.  We don't yet have a working fix for that, but it is a
much less serious issue than the failing-sync problem.

For the new bugzilla component, I'm automatically CC'd but there is no
default assignee.  I didn't want to imply that I will necessarily jump on
every buildbot bug filed myself, though I will try to keep track of it.
Indeed I would very much like to encourage more folks to get involved with
improving the bot stuff.


Thanks,
Roland