[Libreoffice-qa] minutes of ESC call ...

[Stephan Bergmann]

On 04/23/2012 11:15 AM, Norbert Thiebaud wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 4:08 AM, Stephan Bergmann<sbergman at redhat.com>  wrote:
>> On 04/23/2012 10:55 AM, Michael Meeks wrote:
>>>
>>>         So - one advantage of a VM here, is that -if- we have a 'standard'
>>> virtual-machine for this, and do the tinderbox-ness in some snapshot or
>>> somesuch; then in the event of problems, QA or Developers could re-use
>>> the same VM for doing their own testing, so in some ways that might be
>>> more generally useful.
>>
>>
>> Another general advantage of doing tinderbox builds in a VM would be that
>> each build can start from a known-good VM snapshot and a runaway build can
>> be stopped cleanly.  So problems like steadily filling up tmp or leftover
>> processes after a hung test would become non-issues.  (Not that they do
>> plague us, though; just for the record.)
>
> Not really. VM or not the tinderbox operate continuously... we do not
> re-ipl the VM after each build (good thing otherwise we would have to
> pull the git tree from the time the VM was created, which would take
> longer and longer)

This is solvable with updating the VM's git repos "in the background," 
just taking the latest image when starting a VM.

Before we abandoned work on OOo at Oracle last year, we were busy 
setting up a cool VM cluster for such builds.  Michael's remark about 
handing failed build VMs over to devs reminded me about the various 
benefits we envisioned from that work.  But, unfortunately, of course 
nothing came out of it...

And yeah, rather unrelated to the current tinbuild setup, of course.

Stephan