Cuirass enhancements

["Björn Höfling" <bjoern.hoefling@bjoernhoefling.de>]

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Hi Guix,

I was a bit sad that Hydra is down now, because I really got used to
its interface. Thanks to Mark and all others who made their fingers
dirty on that machine. After a little chat on IRC, I decided to compare
Cuirass with Hydra and wrote down what I'm missing or find
uncomfortable in its daily usage.

I think I'm pretty good at pulling apart other people's software and
can be quite picky. So, let me say that I really appreciate what all
contributors have done so far and take this as suggestions for
enhancements.

It might also just be the case that I missed something and what I want
is already implemented in a different way.

After some discussions, I could add this as little, compact bugs into
Debbugs. If you know of already existing bugs, it would be nice if you
could mention them.

Homepage/Specifications list:

* The list of specifications should be ordered alphabetically by its
name.
* The specification and input seams to be redundant. Why?:
("staging-staging	INPUT: staging (on staging)"
* A description would be nice to better understand the use of that
specification.

Clicking into a specification gives a list of evaluations, like here:
https://ci.guix.gnu.org/jobset/guix-master

In that list:

* I'm missing a column with start-date of that evaluation.
* Right now, I see one evaluation where column "Success" being "In
progress ..."
The next evaluations have three colored numbers, in green, red and grey.
When I remember it correctly from Hydra, then "grey" would mean
"queued." But then the term "In progress ..." is a bit misleading, as
those with items in queue are also "In progress ...".

If I understand it right, maybe "Preparing ..." would be a better term?

* [unimportant]: The evaluation lists an input change. It would be nice
to directly point to the new commit (and old commit?). That said, it
could get complicated, as Cuirass is a general build system and not
every git repository has a public interface. Thus, we might need to add
another configuration to the input data-structure, like
"webinterface-uri". Sounds more complicated than worth the efford?

Going into one evaluation, like
https://ci.guix.gnu.org/eval/5874

* It would be nice if the summary of good/bad/queued numbers is repeated
in the header.
* The table should be sorted by job name.
* I'm missing a "completion time" for failed jobs. I mean there must be
some instance in time when failure was evaluated.
* I'm really missing the tabs/filters like in Hydra: "succeding",
"newly succeding", "newly failing", ...
In having all jobs in one big list is annoying. I care usually only
about failures.
* If a job failed because of its dependency, I would like to see which
one caused the problem. I don't know how to find that out.
In Hydra, the name and build log of the failing dependency was directly
available.

Job search:

It's nice that there is a search now, but it's not enough for me :-)

The search string disappears from the search box. It would be very nice
if it would be kept, then I can remember and refine it if necessary.

I would like to see a "build series" for a specific job/system
combination.

For that, In Hydra I searched for the job name. It first presented me
with a list of
"types", like "maven: master/i386" or "maven: staging/x86_64".

Then I had to click one of them to see that specific series.

In the Curiass search, I only have a fulltext search, I cannot choose
the system.

How would I find the proper "maven", not all the "maven-*" packages?

In Hydra, there is a link to this "build series":

https://hydra.nixos.org/job/nixpkgs/staging-next/maven3.x86_64-darwin

Even if I find it hard to get to my specific package by search, I can
modify that link to get to my package (and add a bookmark for my loved
package :-)).


Scrolling:

* I would like to know that I'm on page k/n.
* When scrolling through lists, the semantics of "first/prev/next/last"
is not the way I expect it, at first I thought it is totally broken.

For example this evaluation:

https://ci.guix.gnu.org/eval/5862?border-high-time=1560824784&border-high-id=1398865

I'm at the first tab. "Previous" is greyed out. Then I would expect
"First" also to be greyed out: If I cannot go any further back, I am on
the "First" tab (linear, consecutive order of tabs assumed :-))

Even worse at the end: I can click four times on "Next", and then be at
a page that shows only three jobs (the total number of jobs is not
always dividable by the number of jobs per page, so the last page
usually has a smaller remainder to show):
https://ci.guix.gnu.org/eval/5862?border-high-time=1560816540&border-high-id=1398862
So, I cannot go any NEXTer, that button is greyed out. As with the
beginning, I'm expecting to be already on the LAST page. But the button
is clickable. And when I click it, I will receive a FULL PAGE! It took
me a while to figure out that nothing too bad happened: I'm getting the
last n entrys (where n is the number of elements per page, being 10
here). I can even the hit the "LAST" button, luckily only the page gets
reloaded.

Björn

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