[cfe-dev] [llvm-dev] Buildbot Noise

[Renato Golin via cfe-dev]

On 7 October 2015 at 15:39, James Y Knight <jyknight at google.com> wrote:
> But since nobody actually seemed interested in fixing it, I didn't keep making noise about it. I basically just ignore the failure notices from buildbot, because every commit seems to trigger multiple bogus failure notices, no matter what.

That's not true, either.

We (buildbot owners and admins) are constantly improving the noise by
adding more boards, investigating stability issues and disabling bots
temporarily when they're too noisy. We may not do it at the speed some
people expect, or to the extent that a fully supported validation team
in a big company would, but we do the best we can.


> I don't know what the solution is, but it's got to somehow move towards trying to avoid blaming committers for already-known problems, or for infrastructure issues (e.g.: svn update failed? Why do I care?). It simply does not help to improve the quality of LLVM to have the buildbots send emails to committers of arbitrary patches when a bot that "everyone" already knows is flaky has failed yet again. *I* don't know which bots are "supposed" to be flaky, so if I actually bothered to fully investigate every such notice, that'd just be a massive waste of effort.

The alternative is worse: not testing.

The assumption is wrong: people *do* care, but the problem is harder
than it looks, and needs more than just the bot owner to improve.

I wish I had a magic wand... but I'm not expecting to ever have one.

cheers,
--renato