Broken master and newcomers.

[jan iversen]

> 
> That idea is old -- and yes, having it directly in as a note, tag or brach git
> would be awesome. Personally, I would love to see a "master-ci-verfied" _branch_
> that is following the master branch up to the point that is known good by CI. A
> branch has the advantage that it would allow newcomers to locally rebase their
> commit from one known good state to the next easily.
> 
> However, nothing like that has been implemted yet. So: go go go.

The idea of a branch triggered ideas. Having a special "tinderbox" that regulary (e.g. once a day) controls master and if it builds (at least on linux) merges changes to a fix branch, is something easy to do.

Just today we saw a new contributor having problems due to master being broken, and some of us used time to identify what the problem was.

So IMHO having this feature will save time, meaning I could use time to implement it.

> 
> 
>> An alternative (which I have seen used in another project), would be to let
>> jenkins generate a source tar ball, incl. the .git directory, of the latest
>> sane build.
> 
> No, thats horrible -- it make onboarding to git even harder.
> 
>> I know many will say, but master is sometimes broken, you have to live with
>> that. That is a statement I agree with, for anything else than the first
>> build.
> 
> Nah, the argument was rather: If we have a last 'known good master' everyone
> will use that (including the people who broke master) and nobody will use the
> HEAD of master anymore (nor will those that broke master).
> 
> My guess is that we need automating bisecting on master to really pin down the
> guilty in these cases. See:

If we had a "check master tinderbox", it could probably easy do the bibisecting automatically (going from last known stable build).

> 
> http://people.canonical.com/~bjoern/presentations/tb3.odp
> http://people.canonical.com/~bjoern/presentations/tb3-2014.odp
> https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/gitweb?p=tb3-django.git;a=summary
> https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/gitweb?p=tb3-docker.git;a=summary
> 
> for some abandoned work I did for that. I gave up on it as with gerrit/Jenkins, master
> state seemed 'good enough' to me.

Interesting.

> Heh, hanging those high that break master and didnt verify on Jenkins before --
> esp. now that it is trivial?

New headline for ESC, top master breakers :-)

rgds
jan i.

> 
> Best,
> 
> Bjoern