Re: Continuous Builds in GNOME

[Milan Crha <mcrha redhat com>]

On Mon, 2016-06-06 at 20:32 +0000, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote:
> I think that is the point of the try server, right?  You push it to
> the try server and make sure that it builds correctly for everyone...

        Hi,
if you mean that "jhbuild" is a synonym for "everyone", then you surely
didn't open [1], to which I gave a link to earlier. There jhbuild
succeeded, my local build succeeded, Fedora build succeeded, still
there was an environment where it failed. And it failed properly, I'd
say.

Your idea of the "try server" makes me think of the way WebKit has it
done. You attach a patch to their bugzilla, set some flags and a bot
runs some testing and builds in various environments with that patch
applied. All automated. Anything like that can work for smaller
patches, but once you think of the bigger changes, like the
aforementioned Camel API change [2], you get into a very different
world.

> A lack of diligence on your part for instance costs time and
> headache somewhere else.

Right, I agree, there will be always someone unhappy. The question of
this thread, and the whole idea of the reverts, is who that will be.

> Nope and Emmanuele does stipulate that we need someone to monitor the
> build and act accordingly.  However, the rest of you have an
> obligation when that person nags you about it to respond in a timely
> manner.

I hope it was understood from my mail that I am not part of that "the
rest of you" group. What you said makes me feel that you think that
everyone else is "a bad guy". That's really not true.
 
The "timely manner" is the keyword too. Sometimes it takes time before
the maintainer notices that the Continuous broke. Consider different
timezones, weekends, public holidays in different countries and so on.
Everything matters when it comes to "timely manner".

I know, this thread is also about addressing just this in some not so
cruel way to anyone.

> I think we all agree that there should be change, we just need to
> agree what is the minimal set of things we can accomplish today and
> then iterate there.  We just need to establish a place where we can
> at least start on a path and break current status quo.

I'm sorry, but the current state works for me. Of course, I do not work
on the Continuous, I have no idea how much time and headache it costs
to keep it working with so many involved projects. Thus my point of
view is not objective, it's rather subjective.

> In general, I really don't like the idea that we're all a set of
> fiefdoms with no influence on each other.

Some projects are core parts, where others can use them. Some are on
"leafs", final applications, which cannot be reused (in a library
sense) by others. Those are very different types of projects. As had
been said in this thread, Continuous doesn't build each hosted project
in the GNOME infrastructure.
        Bye,
        Milan

> > [1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=766540
> > [2] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=764065