Re: GNOME Continuous and build breakage

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

Hi all;

Yeah, the ping was pretty much implied - but it's harder to cope with
because I can only ping the people I know on IRC. We don't have a
strict rule matching IRC nicknames to maintainers or even projects,
and I cannot join every single IRC chat room on irc.gnome.org.

I think the ping is a "best effort"; if I can't manage to do that in
30 seconds then I'll just revert and file a bug instead.

I want to send this to desktop-devel-list and try and recruit more
people to be build sheriffs. What do you think?

Ciao,
 Emmanuele.


On 18 December 2015 at 15:04, Javier Jardón <jjardon gnome org> wrote:
> On 16 December 2015 at 18:29, Matthias Clasen <matthias clasen gmail com> wrote:
> > On Thu, Dec 10, 2015 at 1:46 PM, Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com> wrote:
> > > Hi all;
> > >
> > > I've been meaning to discuss this with the release team for a while,
> > > and I probably already annoyed a bunch of people on IRC, so here goes.
> > >
> > > I'd like the r-t to give its blessing to volunteers that decide to act
> > > as "build sheriffs" on Continuous builds. If we exclude the issues
> > > with the build machine itself throwing a fit — something that usually
> > > gets fixed by Colin kicking it — the vast majority of build breakages
> > > come from GNOME projects issues.
> > >
> > > What usually happens when a build goes into perma-red (i.e. it keeps
> > > failing over the same component) is that somebody on the #testable IRC
> > > channel (usually me or Colin Walters) tags the module inside the
> > > Continous manifest, opens a bug, and hopes that a fix get applied and
> > > communicated on the channel so that the tag gets reverted.
> > >
> > > This is not enough, and it does not raise the bar in keeping
> > > Continuous (and thus GNOME) building. It actually lowers it a fair
> > > bit, to the effective point that *nobody* cares about Continuous
> > > builds.
> > >
> > > I want this to change. I want to be able to revert failing commits on
> > > the offending modules, if they are hosted on GNOME infrastructure, if
> > > they fail for more than N hours, and *then* open a bug about it.
> > > Ideally, I want to tag only modules that are *not* hosted on GNOME
> > > infrastructure, as they are beyond our control and commit
> > > capabilities. In short, I want to ensure that GNOME maintainers become
> > > a bit more proactive in giving a crap about their modules breaking on
> > > something that is not their own computers.
> > >
> > > This obviously will need to be discussed on d-d-l, but I'd like to get
> > > some feedback from a limited audience, and hopefully have the release
> > > team backing this initiative — especially in the hope that we can have
> > > more than one build sheriff, to cover more time zones, and avoid
> > > perma-red build failures going on for more than two or three hours,
> > > instead of half a day.
> >
> > This sounds ok to me - I think a policy of pinging the relevant
> > maintainer on irc first before reverting is a good idea (I know I
> > break things occasionally, and would appreciate a ping if I don't see
> > the breakage myself). I'd be happy to help out with this as well
>
> Sorry for the late response.
>
> I'd like to add if ping is not possible, it would be ok to me to
> revert the offending commit and send an email to the maintainer of the
> module explaining why (and probably to the author of the commit as
> well)
>
> Regards,
> Javier Jardón



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