[cfe-dev] [LLVMdev] LLVM IRC channel flooded?

[David Blaikie]

On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 10:40 AM, James Y Knight <jyknight at google.com>
wrote:

> 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.
>

Whenever you get crappy fail-mail, please forward it to llvm-dev, cc'ing
the bot owner and request the issue be addressed or the bot be removed.
Yeah, I know it's not an ideal process, but it's something to keep issues
visible/pushed on.

But, yes, having some more formal process to deal with this sort of thing
would be nice (I can imagine some process along the lines of "bots start in
experimental and need a track record of low flake/false positive results
for some period of time before being promoted out of experimental so they
can send mail to blame lists and IRC, etc" coupled with some mechanism for
demoting a buildbot back into experimental if it starts behaving poorly)

- David


>
>
> 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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>
>
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