Re: Patchwork + automated checking and testing of patches

[Christopher Baines <mail@cbaines.net>]

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Chris Marusich <cmmarusich@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi Chris,
>
> This is really cool stuff!  Thanks for looking into it.
>
> Christopher Baines <mail@cbaines.net> writes:
>
>> I don't intend to do anything with Jenkins, as I think that wouldn't be
>> maintainable, but I think setting up some system to check some of the
>> following would be beneficial:
>
> I'm actually a little hesitant to ask, since I don't have time to
> contribute to this right now, and I don't want to bike-shed.  However,
> I'm just curious: why do you think using Jenkins wouldn't be
> maintainable?  I've read about Jenkins but haven't used it personally,
> and I've heard good things about it, so I'm curious to know why you
> prefer to avoid it entirely.

Sure, I've used Jenkins in different contexts, and indeed currently use
Jenkins, so I've got some experience here.

I'm obviously ignoring all the good parts here, but one source of data
is Debian. It used to have a package for Jenkins, and you can see some
of the work/issues here [1] and the thread about it's removal here [2].

One issue in particular to call out is some potential bootstrapping
issues [3] that seem to have been encountered.

It seems sensible to me to use Guix when doing things related to the
Guix project, like automated testing of patches (dogfooding, if you know
the term). Some of the things I've mentioned here lead me to doubt that
Jenkins will at some point be available through Guix.

So that's something about the maintainability of a Guix package, but
there's an operational component to this as well. The attack surface it
offers is maybe larger than sometimes necessary, if you only need a
read-only web interface for example.

1:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?archive=both;dist=unstable;ordering=normal;repeatmerged=0;src=jenkins
2: https://lists.debian.org/debian-java/2016/01/msg00019.html
3: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=714596

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