[Libreoffice-qa] Annouce: Bibisect for MACOSX

[Norbert Thiebaud]

On Mon, Dec 2, 2013 at 3:37 AM, Robinson Tryon
<bishop.robinson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hmm...a lag of a week in the bibisect repo could be a deal-breaker for
> QA members who try to test with daily builds, especially the members
> who build LO on their own machines right now.

I'm sorry but these are orthogonal issue.

1/ bibisect is to bisect regressions.
2/ bibsect construction right now is not automated (well, except for
the monster canonical build box... when it is active)
3/ uploading of daily build is <> of uploading of tar.gz for the
purpose of bibisect integration. daily build upload dmg/rpm/deb/msi,
whereas for bibisect integration we will upload a tar.gz image of
instdir
4/ it is even more unrelated to someone doing his own build.

iow: bibisect is not intented to find bug in the bleeding edge.. daily
build and self-build are indeed indicated for that. bibisect is to
help narrow down a regression that got past automated testing and the
bleeding edge manual testing..

>
> Tinderboxes do send email, but AFAIK those emails only go to tinderbox
> owners or to devs. QA would like to be kept further appraised about
> not only builds succeeding, but also whether those builds can run and
> function properly.

Daily build upload update teh 'current' link on their respective
secion in the website.
it does that only when it was able to upload a dailybuild that was
sucessfully built
which is deemed a build that can 'run and function properly'.. if it
was know it was not so, it would not be uploaded.

>
>> but sometimes some tb are out-of-order
>
> From what I understand, we did not have official TDF tinderboxes for
> all major platforms until very recently. As a result, it was difficult
> for QA to maintain reliability with volunteer tinderboxes that might
> disappear for a while.
>
> Official TDF tinderboxes are a great improvement in reliability for
> us, and will hopefully enjoy great uptime.
even 'official' TDF tinderboxes require the love and attention of someone....

>
> I agree that bibisect is not the best tool to detect if a tb is not
> currently building. Aside from emailing out, what else can we do to
> more promptly triage and address the situation when a (previously
> building) tb starts to fail to produce viable builds?

I plan to have gerrit buildbot to start to collect information about
tb activity in general
this could work if bjoern tb3 thing reach fruition...
_david_ already added some logging facility in buildbot and the
tb3-plugin on gerrit which in turn should allow
for activity tracking of the tbs... that won't tell if the build is
'viable' but it will tell if a tb has not build anything at all or not
build anyting successfully for some time.

Norbert