Re: PSA: glibc buildbot slave up for aarch64

[Siddhesh Poyarekar <siddhesh at gotplt dot org>]

On Friday 28 April 2017 08:21 PM, Joseph Myers wrote:
> Bugzilla is how we track known bugs.  Just because a particular bug causes 
> a test failure, or a failure on a system with a buildbot, doesn't make it 
> more important than others.  It's true we have too many open bugs needing 
> fixing, and that simply saying "this test fails for me" (or, worse, "this 
> omnibus set of possibly unrelated tests all fail for me") is not a good 
> bug report without sufficient analysis to show it's a bug in glibc and 
> identify any relevant conditions for it to fail.
> 
> It's a lot friendlier for users and distributors if our collective 
> knowledge about expected failures is reflected in XFAILs (with appropriate 
> comments referencing the bugs in Bugzilla) than if people need to refer to 
> lists on the wiki to identify whether particular failures are known.

For that the XFAILs should have an additional reference point than just
bugzilla reports.  The red status on buildbot is an eye-sore and I am
hoping that the eyesore will drive at least some of us to try and fix it.

>> 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.
> 
> That logic would say the hppa build failures should have resulted in the 
> reversion of the NPTL changes causing them, if someone had an hppa 
> buildbot.  We need to judge case by case how important a given regression 
> is (and for non-regression failures - in which category I include failures 
> from a newly added test that only works on some platforms - I don't think 
> they're generally going to be release blockers).

The key point here is that there *is* no hppa buildbot and the reason is
quite clear IMO - there is nobody bothered enough to take the effort to
host one and that is what takes the responsibility away from the NPTL
patch submitter.

In any case I agree that this should be decided on a case to case basis
and it shouldn't be a rule set in stone.  What I want to convey is that
the XFAIL mechanism doesn't mean anything useful currently other than
using it to make buildbot statuses green and that is only going to
result in more bugs being pushed under the rug.

Siddhesh