[cfe-dev] LLVM IRC channel flooded?

[James Y Knight]

Yes, I also find the amount of bot spam in #llvm is basically intolerable.
It makes it difficult to see actual people talking. At first, I just put
all the bots on /ignore. Now I have an xchat script to move the botspam to
another tab (tabify-004.pl). I'd recommend that the bots should just be
moved to #llvm-bots and fix the problem for everyone. Those who are
committing changes can join that channel, too, and others don't care.

While we're on this subject, I also find the official buildbot page (
lab.llvm.org:8011) almost unusable, since so many columns are either always
red, or else are so flaky that they basically randomly alternate between
passing and failing. So, at a glance, it's impossible to tell whether the
current state of the tree is good. (I certainly haven't memorized which
ones are "supposed" to be red, and which are not. Maybe others have).
Having flaky and always-failing builds show up on the buildbot pages, and
notifying IRC, really has negative utility, since it not only is not
providing useful information, but is serving to obscure the actual
important failures, and causing people to spend time investigating
non-problems.

Someone gave me the hint to use the http://bb.pgr.jp/ buildbot page
instead, which was a great recommendation -- that page shows problems much
more clearly. But it's unfortunate that there *needs* to be a separate
"sane builders only" buildmaster.

E.g. (and not to pick on this particular bot, this is just one example of
many):
http://lab.llvm.org:8011/builders/clang-native-arm-cortex-a9/builds/27655 --
passed, while the previous failed. But, it's not caused by the commit, it's
just arbitrary.

Or, yesterday, on #llvm: "Anyone want to give me a clue as to why this bot
failed?
http://lab.llvm.org:8011/builders/sanitizer-x86_64-linux/builds/18017" --
answer: because it's randomly broken. Wasted the questioner's time trying
to investigate the failure.


If all the flaky or always-broken builder configurations got hidden from
the main pages of buildbot, and stopped sending emails/IRC notifications to
anyone but their "owner", that would be a substantial improvement.

On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 10:15 AM, Renato Golin <renato.golin at linaro.org>
wrote:

> Folks,
>
> I know it's a reasonably valuable thing to have the buildbot IRC bot
> publishing results, but the channel is kind of flooded with the
> messages, and the more bots we put up, the worse it will be.
>
> I think we still need the NOC warnings, but not over IRC. The Buildbot
> NOC page is horrible and useless, since it doesn't know the difference
> between "it's red and I know it" from "it's broken".
>
> For that reason, I have built my own NOC page:
>
> http://people.linaro.org/~renato.golin/llvm/arm-bots/
>
> But that machine is too slow to cope with all bots. We may need a
> project to build such a system on a larger scale.
>
> However, for now, I think not printing the green results in IRC would
> go a long way of cleaning the channel up.
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> cheers,
> --renato
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