Re: How to notice when my change breaks something

[Mark H Weaver <mhw@netris.org>]

Hi Chris,

Chris Marusich <cmmarusich@gmail.com> writes:

> How do you notice when a change breaks something else?  You so
> frequently notice these things, it almost seems like you're omniscient!
>
> Do you have an automated mechanism for doing this, or are you manually
> checking things frequently?

I regularly check Hydra for newly failed packages.  To see the most
recent evaluations, visit <https://hydra.gnu.org/evals>.  Each
evaluation corresponds to a commit of Guix's git repo.  You can compare
two evaluations with URLs of the form
<https://hydra.gnu.org/eval/109907?compare=109906>, which will compare
evaluation 109907 to the previous evaluation 109906.  It is also often
useful to compare to a slightly older evaluation, especially one with an
unusually low number of failures, e.g.
<https://hydra.gnu.org/eval/109907?compare=109896> where 109896 was the
most recent evaluation of 'master' with fewer than 1900 failures.

Note that hydra.gnu.org is not sufficiently powerful for the work it is
currently doing, so it often takes on the order of several *minutes* for
the above URLs to load, and sometimes the Nginx front-end will time-out
before that happens.  Our new build farm is vastly more powerful, but
its web interface is currently quite rudimentary and not yet sufficient
for the kind of monitoring I do on Hydra.

Hope this helps.

       Mark