We had an in-person conversation about build sheriff and improved tools
at our weekly platform group meeting (1). After some discussion, we came
up with this plan for the short term:
+ Bear will write a script that sends email when a Tinderbox goes red.
It will only send email to people who have checked in after the last
green build was started, or some similarly reasonable algorithm. PJE and
Bear will collaborate on the algorithm.
+ We will not run this script against the performance Tinderboxes until
they are more consistently green.
+ All committers are responsible for running unit tests and making sure
their commit did not cause Tinderboxes to run red or orange. We do
understand that developers don't run tests on every platform before
every commit, and sometimes commits in quick succession will cause
conflict problems, so sometimes a commit will cause a problem.
+ Committers are responsible for noticing when their commit has caused a
problem. Committers can watch Tinderbox, or respond to the email.
+ We will be proactive about disabling tests that cause false positives
(bogus test failures). In particular, we will disable tests that do
outside network operations. (The long term solution is to create mock
servers or clients for this purpose).
+ Heikki, Bear and others will be proactive about communicating about
well known common false positives, so that they are easily recognized.
+ Heikki is going to proceed with drawing up a "sheriff" schedule. We
anticipate that the above measures will be enough that we can all "self
police" in most cases. The sheriff's role is to monitor the build and
make sure build problems don't fall through the cracks.
The core of the proposal is that comitters will stand up and take
responsibility for not breaking the build or the tests. We'll also
invest in the build, tests, and Tinderbox so that we avoid wasting
people's time with false alarms.
Thoughts on the proposal?
In the long term, we can continue to work on the projects that have been
discussed, making Tinderbox ever more useful.
Personal aside: I'll point out that it is *very* bad form to do a commit
without running tests and then disappear for hours. It is a lack of
respect for other people's time, which is counter to our values here.
Cheers,
Katie
(1) http://wiki.osafoundation.org/bin/view/Journal/PlatformMtg20060131
Heikki Toivonen wrote:
A few people offered to help with tools. Here are some tools we could
have some improvements with (all that I could remember/think of):
I haven't heard any takers for the projects I mentioned. If tool
improvements are not happening, then the manual process is the option we
are left with.
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