[Xorg] Xorg tinderbox status

[Bryce Harrington]

On Mon, 9 Aug 2004, Carl Karsten wrote:
> > *Nod* Understood.  I've been poking around to find out more about
> > options like these.  On brief look at the code it appears pretty
> > configurable, although the process needs to be sorted out and
> > documented.  We may not have an ideal solution figured out for this
> > prior to the release, though.
>
> Good.  I would hope that some significant improvements can be made with some
> minor changes:
>
> 1. cvs up -dP

Jim indicates that this is already how it works...  I haven't explored
the code that does this, though.

> 2. if a build fails, log it and do make clean

I would actually suggest that you install ccache; this way you can let
it do make clean each time, but only files which actually change will
have to get recompiled.  That'll give you better performance, plus avoid
false positives (rare, but do happen).

> 3. Some sort of scheduler - either the script only runs once and we hook it to a
> cron job, or a config option to specify how often it should check for updates.
> The later would do better if a build runs long (like if it is set to check for
> updates every 4 hours, don't check if a build is taking 4.5  hours - when the
> build is done, it can check and start over.)

You can essentially do this now.  run-client.sh is a short (8 line) bash
script that wrappers the tinderclient code.  You'll notice a --throttle
setting there, that appears to control how long it should wait after
doing a build; you could set this to 4 hrs if you want to reduce how
often it's run.  I only played with it briefly, but it seemed to work as
advertised.

The trouble with using cron-jobs for this sort of testing is the risk of
getting into race conditions, so it's safer on your system to do it in a
while() loop with a throttle delay.

Note that tinderclient.pl has a few more options for controlling its
behavior on your system.  Run ./tinderclient.pl --help to get a list of
them.  I don't have experience with any of them other than --throttle,
so YMMV, but that seems to be an effective way to customize it to suit
how you want to use it.

Bryce