state of the buildbot

[Frederic Peters <fpeters 0d be>]

Hello all,

The three slaves are now running smoothly, some build failures could
sure be fixed[1], automatically even for some, and that is part of
this message, how do we improve the system now?

 - the coverage reports, they were really nice but they need the build
   slave to have a webserver to publish them; perhaps that step could
   be made optional, and we would mandate one of the build slaves to
   be the "coverage reports" slave?

 - current setup requires an attentive eye (or more) to catch
   regressions; it would be great to have per-module and per-slave
   feeds, listing build regressions (per-slave is easy, that is just a
   module who failed, while building the previous time; per-module may
   be more difficult, as we could want the regression to happen in
   more than half the slaves failed before assuming it is module
   regression, especially if we want to hook module regressions to IRC
   nagging).
 
 - way less important but nice would be to have the build master
   reload its configuration (list of slaves, list of modules) without
   having to be restarted (I am sure it is almost there but I didn't
   have the time to finish this).

 - another nice thing would be to have "administrative tasks" that
   could be sent by the master, things like updating modulesets or
   removing a module directory.

 - particularly useful at the moment would be the handling of more
   than a single moduleset by a single master; so it could send 2.26
   jobs to all slaves but one, keeping it at 2.24 as long as necessary
   (2.24.1 at least, maybe 2.24.2).  Another use would be for the
   release team to tell a slave to build the moduleset they
   release[2].


If anybody suddenly gets lots of free time, that is a nice list of
ideas to spend it :)



        Frederic


[1] afaik there is mozilla not building (and causing a bunch of other
    modules not to build on slaves that never got mozilla installed), 
    glib that went up to 2.19 in the moduleset and that is now wrongly
    picked and some CVS/Subversion updates that fails after generated
    files have been commited.
    
[2] At http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/teams/releng/*/*.modules