[llvm-dev] Buildbot Noise

[James Y Knight via llvm-dev]

On Oct 7, 2015, at 6:10 AM, Renato Golin via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
>> I'm looking at the existing behavior of the community - if people are
>> generally ignoring the result of a bot anyway (& if it's red for weeks at a
>> time, I think they are) then the notifications are providing no value.
> 
> I'm not seeing that, myself. So far, you're the only one that is
> shouting out loud that this or that bot is noisy.


I pointed this out as a major issue when I first started with LLVM. 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.

It's just so much easier to ignore those notices than to get involved in a debate about why sending out useless failure notices that have nothing to do with any of the commits being blamed is actively harmful -- *worse* than useless.

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.

So I just ignore the notices. Sorry...