Re: Minutes x2 for release team 2002-10-30 and 2002-11-06

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Wed, Nov 13, 2002 at 08:32:26AM +0000, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> On Wed, 2002-11-13 at 00:54, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote:
[...]
> > Looking at the Tinderbox results is one way to assure a build. Other
> > ways are building it yourself regularly and responding quickly when
> > people mention on IRC or in email that things aren't building -- then
> > the sheriff needs to go in, work out if it's a real build problem (which
> > about half of the ones I saw were not -- they were caused by problems on
> > people's system) and then fix it, if necessary. Surely the goal is
> > simply to keep the tree buildable during a time-sensitive phase of
> > development. How that is achieved is irrelevant.
> 
> Besides the point ? I don't think so. Many of the people that could be
> in such a position (Build Sherriff) are hobbyist that probably don't
> have time to rebuild GNOME 24 hours a day. A Tinderbox is an essential
> tool for the job.

Since there's never been a clear role description for the build sheriff,
it's a little hard to be sure here, but the job seems to be a person (or
people) who have permission to go into any CVS module that has a certain
line in their HACKING file and change build problems without needing to
ask permission first. Their goal is to keep peace throughout the galaxy
... no, wait .. their goal is to keep the tree buildable as much as
possible.

Having a tinderbox that rebuilds time after time is _one_ way to
achieve this. However, if the tinderbox breaks at 0300 for the build
sheriff, they don't wake up to fix it -- it gets fixed when they wake
up. If you or I are building at that time, however, and we find that it
has broken, we can do nothing about it.

Which is exactly why I made the original request: let's have a few
people around the timezones who build regularly. If one of those is Dan
with access to the tinderbox logs, great. Leading up to 2.0, I would
have been building at least once per day. I can't have been the only
one.

This started out as a simple request to solve a problem that really
happened. If it's such a big deal to people to solve in a simple fashion
then just forget it. :(

Malcolm

-- 
Atheism is a non-prophet organization.