[Libreoffice-qa] Annouce: Bibisect for MACOSX

[Norbert Thiebaud]

On Sun, Dec 1, 2013 at 3:52 PM, Robinson Tryon
<bishop.robinson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> You say "the TDF tb box" -- do you mean multiple boxes?

yes
>
>> They will upload their install-dir (tar.gz) in a staging area in tdf infra
>> and these will be stitched together later...
>
> automatically, I hope? The QA Team has been expecting that daily
> builds would be available promptly in bibisect repos.

semi-automatically... that is automatically but with human
supervision... has mishap need to be caugh and fixed early

I imagine that there would be a log of a few days... maybe a week
between the head of a branch and the bibisect repo..
if for no other reason that git gc does a better job if it has many
loose object to compact, compression wise
and doing git gcc --aggressive to balance that once in a while is
prohibitively expensive... and as the repo become build, won;t even
run on most machines

>
>
> Interesting -- I'd assume that it would be roughly as easy to work
> with the tarballs as with the commits in the repo. Storing all of
> those builds individually might take a bit of space, but if we can
> manage it, I don't see a reason not to hang on to the source tarballs.

we can't..  2500 build for the 4-2 dev period... mutliplied by 200MB
taht is 500GB for Mac alone
and that is just for the period May-December 2013
that is 5GB in a bibisect repo...

>
>> This will also allow.. in case a particular patch made the thing
>> unbuildable for a while... to retrospectively re-build that section of
>> the history using a 'patched' version at each step to avoid the the
>> bug the prevented the build to start with...
>
> When you say "re-build," if we're re-building from source, how would
> the tarballs help us?

because I can rebuild _some_ missing section... and stich the rest
using the tarball
I've been doing that dance for the past 3 weeks building the Mac bibisect

>
>
> My hope with bibisect is that we'll prevent any of the primary builds
> from breaking "for weeks at a time." I think that there are enough
> Win/Mac/Linux people on the QA Team willing to test against the daily
> bibisect repos that we'll notice if the build breaks for even a couple
> of days.

no it won't. we already have tinderbox that send email when stuff
breaks.. but sometimes some tb are out-of-order, sometimes stuff get
overlooked, sometimes shit happens etc...

iow bibisect will not help us to detect that something does not
build... sicne we build far more often than we aggregate bibisect
build...

Norbert