[llvm-dev] Buildbot Noise

[Eric Christopher via llvm-dev]

On Wed, Oct 7, 2015 at 2:24 PM Renato Golin <renato.golin at linaro.org> wrote:

> On 7 October 2015 at 22:14, Eric Christopher <echristo at gmail.com> wrote:
> > As a foreword: I haven't read a lot of the thread here and it's just a
> > single developer talking here :)
>
> I recommend you to, then. Most of your arguments are similar to
> David's and they don't take into account the difficulty in maintaining
> non-x86 buildbots.
>
>
OK. I've now read the rest of the thread and don't find any of the
arguments compelling for keeping flaky bots around for notifications. I
also don't think that the x86-ness of it matters here. The powerpc64 and
hexagon bots are very reliable.


> What you're both saying is basically the same as: We want all the cars
> we care about in our garage, but only as long as they can race in F1.
> However, you care about the whole range, from beetles to McLarens, but
> are only willing to cope with the speed and reliability of the latter.
> You'll end up with only McLarens in your garage. It just doesn't make
> sense.
>
>
I think this is a poor analogy. You're also ignoring the solution I gave
you in my previous mail for slow bots.


> Also, very briefly, I want the same as both of you: reliability. But I
> alone cannot guarantee that. And even with help, I can only get there
> in months, not days. To get there, we need to *slowly* move towards
> it, not drastically throw away everything that is not a McLaren and
> only put them back when they're as fast as a McLaren. It just won't
> happen, and the risk of a fork becomes non-trivial.
>

I think this is a completely ridiculous statement. I mean, feel free if
that's the direction you think you need to go, but I'm not going to
continue down that thread with you.

Basically what I'm saying is that if you want a bot to be public and people
to pay attention to it then you need to have some basic stability
guarantees. If you can't give some basic stability guarantees then the bot
is only harming the entire testing infrastructure. That said, having your
own internal bots is entirely useful, it just means that it's up to you to
notice failures and provide some sort of test case to the community. We
could even have a "beta" bot site if something is reliable enough for that,
but not reliable enough for general consumption. I believe you mentioned
having a separate bot master before, we have other bot masters as well -
see the green dragon stuff with jenkins.

-eric

 ps. Have actually added Chris Matthews to talk about the buildbot staging
work. Or even moving the rest of the bots to something staged, or anything.
:)
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