Re: Proposal: Build timers

[Vagrant Cascadian <vagrant@debian.org>]

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On 2021-11-24, zimoun wrote:
> On Tue, 23 Nov 2021 at 18:50, Julien Lepiller <julien@lepiller.eu> wrote:
>> Do we even care that much about accuracy? I don't really care that the
>> build takes 30 or 31 seconds, or even 1 minute, but I certainly care
>> whether it takes 30s or 3h. I think this is also what SBUs give you: a
>> rough estimate of which build is longer than the other. I think a
>> simple proportionality relation would work well enough in most common
>> cases. It might be quite off on a super computer, but who cares,
>> really?
>
> What if it takes 3h and the prediction says 2h?

Those sound about "the same" for any kind of reasonable expectation...

I would guess you only want the correct order of magnitude... hours,
minutes, days, weeks, months, years... or maybe quick, fast, slow,
painful.

I do this soft of fuzzy estimation all the time when working on
Reproducible Builds in Debian; look at the past test history to get a
*rough* estimate of how long I might expect a build to take. This helps
me decide if I should start a build and get a $COFFEE, do some
$SWORDFIGHTING on the $OFFICECHAIRS, or sit and watch the progress bar
so I don't loose the mental state working on the problem becuase it will
be done $SOON.

Make it clear it's an estimate, or maybe even abstract away the time
units so that there is no expectation of any particular time.

I know there are people who would love to get a a value that was
consistently right but to be *useful* it only needs an estimate to be
mostly not completely wrong. At least to me. :)


live well,
  vagrant

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