[cfe-dev] Can we remove llvmbb from IRC?

[David Blaikie via cfe-dev]

On Tue, Sep 1, 2020 at 12:07 PM Nico Weber via cfe-dev <
cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> llvmbb's job is to inform people of build breaks. However, it seems to
> trigger for a big list of bots, and at least one of them seems to always be
> broken,
>

If a bot is always broken it shouldn't be sending email/notifications -
generally they are configured only to send email on green>red and red>green
transitions, so if it's already broken you shouldn't be blamed for it. If
you are seeing bot spam or emails from a bot that's already red, please
email llvm-dev and the bot maintainer and ask the bot to be reconfigured or
disabled.

If a bot is regularly flakey (& thus sending email/notifications that are
false-positives/that no one can act on) please also send email asking for
the bot to be reconfigured or disabled. (or, if you want to be a bit more
punchy - send a patch to the zorg repository to have the bot disabled &
explain why you're proposing that)


> and the broken bots tend to have cycle times of several hours.
>

Long cycle times are a real problem - that might be best left to another
discussion about buildbot maintenance - I would be for a policy that says
bot windows shouldn't be longer than, say, an hour or maybe less. (so, eg:
if you have a bot that's just going to take 5 hours to run - then you need
5 machines that each pickup work every hour, so the blame lists are
smaller) this doesn't solve the problem of being notified 5 hours later
about a breakage that was caused by someone else who committed a few
minutes before or after you. Solving that problem will require a much
greater investment in infrastructure to chain buildbots, possibly use built
artefacts from one buildbot to another, etc.


> So if you're on IRC and you commit something, you get pinged by llvmbb for
> hours afterwards.
>
> Does anyone think llvmbb is useful?
>

I sometimes find it useful, but happy to move to llvm-build to get those
notifications. Other folks might not know to do that, though.


> The best thing about llvmbb I've heard it's easy to just "/ignore llvmbb",
> but if that's what everybody does then why not not have it in the first
> place?
>
> Nico
> _______________________________________________
> cfe-dev mailing list
> cfe-dev at lists.llvm.org
> https://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cfe-dev
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/cfe-dev/attachments/20200901/9a7bf16f/attachment.html>