[ANNOUNCE] : Gerrit Patch Verification Buildbot

[Norbert Thiebaud]

On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 5:16 PM, Eike Rathke <erack at redhat.com> wrote:
> Hi Norbert,
>
> On Saturday, 2013-01-26 01:48:17 -0600, Norbert Thiebaud wrote:
>
>> The goal being to test build gerrit patch on Linux, Mac and Windows,
>> to verify them before they get integrated.
>
> First of all: Great stuff! Thanks!
>
>> Fourth we will ask people to leave the Verify field of the patches to
>> the care of the tinderboxes, unless there are pressing reason not to,
>> and wait until they pass the buildbot verification before pushing them
>
> I have one request here. Could we keep the Verify field for manual "I
> tried this patch and can verify it fixes the problem or implements the
> feature", and have an additional field for the automated builds, for
> example "Builds"?

Well everything is possible but it would be messy.
The 'Submit' button enforce rules wrt to the state of the label.
for instance a patch can only be submitted if tehre is at least a +1
verify and no -1 verify and if there is a +2 review and no -2 review.
if you add a new 'verify' field then
1/ that field will need to _have_ a value before one can submit
2/ the other verify would have to have a value +1 too before one can submit...
that is kind of awkard.

Otoh, you can still add your own +1 verify today... and we wil now it
is a 'manual' one because of the user associated with that +1 verify
all the automated +1 verify would come from the the 'gerrit' user...
your own would be assocaited with 'Eike'
iow there can be already more than one verify value recorded.
see https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/#/c/1885/  for an example.

Now I think the real issue is : what if the builbot assigned a -1 and
I know that was a false positive... how do I get to override that -1
so that I can still 'Publish' that patch. the answer is: we have a
command line to do just that... eventually a group of committers will
be granted 'Buildbot admin' that will allow them to manually overrule
the Verify status that the gerrit user had set.

Right now false negative are still quite likely,because master is
quite often still broken... so a patch may fail just because it was
based on a broken master....
But hopefully over time, as more and more patch make their way to
gerrit and are build tested before being pushed... we should have less
and less 'red' master and the number of false negative should be
reduced to acceptable level.... iow I expect that that 'command line
to override gerrit buildbot' will become quite a rare need.

Norbert