From: Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>
To: emacs-devel@gnu.org
Subject: Re: eshell-defgroup. Do we really need this?
Date: Mon, 04 Aug 2008 13:38:58 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <86vdygzku5.fsf@lifelogs.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: 87sykiguzc.fsf__45993.8457854607$1217872198$gmane$org@uwakimon.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
On Mon, 4 Aug 2008 17:49:01 +0000 (UTC) "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org> wrote:
SJT> Ted Zlatanov writes:
SJT> Romain's right, you don't need confirmation. If a clean build breaks,
SJT> it's broke. What to do about it is another question.
>>
>> Builds can break for many reasons, some local (e.g. disk full). Why
>> bother many people with a false report?
SJT> Because they don't happen much in practice on well-maintained 'bots,
SJT> which is what you want.
I guess I come from a background of sysadmin, where things that can go
wrong will, so I'd rather not assume this. I've had enough experience
with "this should never happen" happening at 3 AM.
>> It would condition them to ignore truly broken builds.
SJT> Excuse me, but isn't the problem that they already do?? (Yes, I know
SJT> that's specious. It's still true. Fix the bigger problem first. :-)
No. You're confusing issues. What I'm trying to help provide is a
proactive mechanism. The current broken build detection is reactive:
users report busted builds or developers find out when they do a build.
So broken builds just don't emerge as a problem quickly.
SJT> XEmacs and SXEmacs see *way* fewer "broken build" reports, and when
SJT> we do, the response is almost always that the responsible developer
SJT> pipes up with "oops, my bad, fixed" within 24 hours. I've *never*
SJT> seen the kind of "Did you wait until the goat died? You can't
SJT> start the build before the sacrificial goat is dead!" threads that
SJT> are so common on emacs-devel.
Well, maybe that will change when we can identify the change that broke
the builds. I am not trying to change social dynamics, regardless.
It's neither my target nor my interest, and the Emacs maintainers should
address that side of the process.
SJT> If there is a 'bot spewing because of disk full, sentence the 'bot
SJT> owner to some public service like reading the entire Collected Works
SJT> of Richard Stallman (including the source code to all his programs)
SJT> out loud at the main gate of Microsoft.
SJT> If and when the rate of disk full reports reaches 10% of the rate of
SJT> genuine breakage, start forwarding them as bug reports to buildbot.
I was giving an example. By definition you can't anticipate every
failure mode, so I'd rather not assume builds will always work. Here's
some other causes: transient network outage, missing/broken libraries,
misconfiguration, race conditions, OS limitations, ACLs, memory/CPU
usage limits, swap space/process table/memory exhaustion, power outage,
filesystem corruption... I could go on, but the point is a broken build
from a single system can be caused by too many factors external to the
build process.
SJT> Also, it shouldn't be hard to construct a filter that recognizes
SJT> such and pings the 'bot owner. If you have access to the Mailman
SJT> pipeline, it can easily be installed in the list config (ie, without
SJT> risk to other Mailman lists) and set up to ping only interested
SJT> parties, and not forward it to the list.
My suggestion was to look for 5 or more broken build reports from
buildbots in the community. I think that's better than the workarounds
you suggest, because it's not dependent on anything other than agreement
between separate systems. Your solution recognizes potential failure
modes *after* they occur and works backwards after the annoyance has
already happened.
Ted
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2008-08-04 18:38 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 19+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2008-07-29 22:27 eshell-defgroup. Do we really need this? Alan Mackenzie
2008-07-31 19:17 ` Ted Zlatanov
2008-07-31 19:18 ` Lennart Borgman (gmail)
2008-08-01 15:34 ` Ted Zlatanov
2008-08-01 17:08 ` Romain Francoise
2008-08-01 20:30 ` Ted Zlatanov
2008-08-02 4:18 ` Stephen J. Turnbull
2008-08-04 16:34 ` Ted Zlatanov
2008-08-04 17:49 ` Stephen J. Turnbull
2008-08-04 18:38 ` Ted Zlatanov [this message]
2008-08-05 8:20 ` Stephen J. Turnbull
2008-08-05 13:57 ` buildbots (was: eshell-defgroup. Do we really need this?) Ted Zlatanov
2008-08-05 20:25 ` Stephen J. Turnbull
2008-08-08 15:26 ` place to send build failure reports? (was: buildbots) Ted Zlatanov
2008-08-08 15:58 ` place to send build failure reports? Chong Yidong
2008-08-03 19:02 ` eshell-defgroup. Do we really need this? Romain Francoise
2008-08-04 16:31 ` Ted Zlatanov
2008-08-01 16:10 ` Progress: " Alan Mackenzie
2008-08-07 19:25 ` Stefan Monnier
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