Adding binutils to the GNU Toolchain buildbot on sourceware

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi Luis,

On Mon, Apr 25, 2022 at 01:16:44PM +0100, Luis Machado wrote:
> On 4/25/22 11:43, Frank Ch. Eigler wrote:
> > > As a general comment, I think we should have a single buildbot entry for the
> > > whole of binutils-gdb.
> > 
> > Perhaps!
> > 
> > > Given changes to bfd and opcodes can affect gdb, why not build gdb alongside
> > > the other tools? You don't need to run the gdb testsuite, which should make
> > > things much more deterministic.
> > 
> > But this is not an argument for building gdb as a part of testing binutils.
> > This is an argument for building & testing gdb if binutils changes.
> > That is: an additional buildbot job
> 
> An additional buildbot job for gdb/gdbserver would be fine. It's just that a
> single build for everything is simpler, in my opinion.
> 
> Is the idea to revive the old buildbot we had for GDB, but for binutils?

We could provide some of the builds that the old buildbot did for
GDB. But the new builder is not GDB specific and I hope we can learn
from the old gdb buildbot.

The problem with the old gdb buildbot is that it did too much and had
flaky test results. This caused people to not care, think the reports
were annoying, broken builds sometimes only got reported after hours or
even days.

I think we should try to keep builds/checks under 10 minutes, that the
checks should be for things that the maintainers think should always
be green. So that you get a report about something important breaking
within 10 minutes while you still know what you did. Another reason to
keep build/check times short is so you can test multiple commits per
hour.

If there are extra resources then we can also add builders that take
longer and/or run testsuites on arches/distros that are known
broken. But those would then probably not sent out reports but you
would use them to see the current status of some setup that might not
be 100% green. And that would probably mean adding more
hardware/workers.

I assume that knowing that gdb and gdbserver still build OK, without
running any tests might be important to the gdb maintainers. And that
just a build of gdb and gdbserver will take < 10 minutes on most
setups.

If so lets just pick one or more of the workers which seem like stable
distros/arches that should always build gdb:
https://builder.sourceware.org/buildbot/#/workers
(don't pick sourceware, which is special, debian-arm64, debian-armhf,
debian-i386 or fedora-ppc64 which are too slow)

Provide a file list (directories) of files in the binutils-gdb.git
repo that should trigger a build.

A configure and make line that does a quick build for just
gdb/gdbserver which should always build.

If the is a make check-something that can be executed quickly, < 5
minutes runtime, and that should always be green please include
it. But please exclude anything that takes too long, isn't known
all-green or contains flaky tests.

And the mailinglist to which to report any failing commits.
gdb-patches I assume?

Cheers,

Mark