Hello hackers, I'd like to discuss ways to improve the buildfarm experience for anyone who are interested in using information which buildfarm gives to us.
Unless I'm missing something, as of now there are no means to determine whether some concrete failure is known/investigated or fixed, how frequently it occurs and so on... From my experience, it's not that unbelievable that some failure occurred two years ago and lost in time was an indication of e. g. a race condition still existing in the code/tests and thus worth fixing. But without classifying/marking failures it's hard to find such or other interesting failure among many others... The first way to improve things I can imagine is to add two fields to the buildfarm database: a link to the failure discussion (set when the failure is investigated/reproduced and reported in -bugs or -hackers) and a commit id/link (set when the failure is fixed). I understand that it requires modifying the buildfarm code, and adding some UI to update these fields, but it allows to add filters to see only unknown/non-investigated failures in the buildfarm web interface later. The second way is to create a wiki page, similar to "PostgreSQL 17 Open Items", say, "Known buildfarm test failures" and fill it like below: <url to failure1> <url to failure2> ... Useful info from the failure logs for reference ... <link to -hackers thread> --- This way is less invasive, but it would work well only if most of interested people know of it/use it. (I could start with the second approach, if you don't mind, and we'll see how it works.) Best regards, Alexande|r|
