[cfe-dev] LLVM IRC channel flooded?

[Philip Reames]

On 05/19/2015 10:40 AM, James Y Knight 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 
> <http://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 <http://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.
+1, this is a really good summary of issues.  I'm in full support of any 
and all efforts to reduce noise here.

I've gotten to the point where I only watch a small handful bots. 
Anything other than that, I pretty much ignore unless someone emails me 
directly or replies to a commit.  I'm not quite to point of marking 
buildbot emails as spam, but I'm definitely not paying them much 
attention either.  One particular irritant is getting emails 12-24 hours 
later about someone else's breakage that has *already been fixed*.  The 
long cycling bots are really irritating in that respect.

>
> On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 10:15 AM, Renato Golin 
> <renato.golin at linaro.org <mailto: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/
>     <http://people.linaro.org/%7Erenato.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
>     _______________________________________________
>     cfe-dev mailing list
>     cfe-dev at cs.uiuc.edu <mailto:cfe-dev at cs.uiuc.edu>
>     http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/cfe-dev
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> cfe-dev mailing list
> cfe-dev at cs.uiuc.edu
> http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/cfe-dev

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/cfe-dev/attachments/20150520/085b0b11/attachment.html>