Re: [gnome-love] Tinderbox (automatic daily build) for GNOME

["Luis Villa" <luis villa gmail com>]

Hi, Alejandro!

On 3/27/06, Alejandro Garcia Castro <acastro igalia com> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 27, 2006 at 09:25:24AM -0500, Luis Villa wrote:
> > On 3/27/06, Julien Gilli <julien gilli wengo fr> wrote:
> > > Hello,
> > >
> > >
> > > On 3/27/06, Luis Villa <luis villa gmail com> wrote:
> > > > When I looked at buildbot last year it seemed like setting it up to
> > > > build multiple, consecutive, interdependent tarballs (i.e., gnome)
> > >
> > > Could you please give us further details about what was the technical
> > > problem by the time you tried?
> >
> > [...]
> >
> > * understand dependencies in that list, so that if a build of glib
> > fails, the entire run restarts, but if a build of gok (or something
> > else which nothing depends on) fails, the run continues after gok.
> >
> > * distinguish between build and test failures. If *building* gtk
> > fails, the failure needs to be reported and the entire build run must
> > restart. If an obscure a11y test of gtk fails, the failure must be
> > reported and the build *must continue*, otherwise there would never be
> > a successful build.
>
> Hi guys,
>
> I'm interested in this topic, in our company we have been using mozilla
> tinderbox for some time (http://www.mozilla.org/tinderbox.html), in order to
> integrate some applications based on Gnome. We already have a public
> tinderbox server with projects, you can see an example here:
>
> http://tinderbox.fisterra.org/fisterra_repair/status.html
>
> In my opinion this tool is powerful but it has some lacks, it can be
> integrated with other mozilla tools (bonsai, bugzilla, lxr) but for instance
> the configuration is a mess and you have to modify perl scripts to change
> some behavior.

I believe someone (greg?) once tried to set up mozilla tinderbox for
GNOME, but that they eventually found it too complicated to set up.

> Regarding the integration with jhbuild

It doesn't necessarily *need* to integrate with jhbuild, but it needs
to get that ordering and (ideally) dependency information from
*somewhere.*

> and the features Luis
> has pointed out, mozilla-tinderbox would require to get the ordered list of
> modules and maybe call each phase separately (checkout, configure, build,
> install, test, etc.)

The only really important information is 'did build succeed' and 'did
tests succeed'. It is nice that jhbuild separates out
checkout/configure/build/install (since they are each distinct phases
likely to fail) but as long as the logs are kept and easy to interpret
that is only icing.

> to have a more detailed control of the process. Also
> the system can distinguish the build and the test phase. I don't know any
> detail of buildbot so I can't compare both systems, maybe someone in the
> list can help with this.

Buildbot has a lot of nice plugins to do things like notify IRC of a
build breakage, handle emailing, etc., and integration now with
several different source control systems.

> Anyway, we can help with this kind of tools and the integration environment
> regarless the selected solution, we can even ask for some resources here to
> carry out the compilation and use our integration server.

That would be awesome! Perhaps the best place to start would be just
to investigate what it would take to create and update the necessary
control files for a 'basic' build of gnome in mozilla tinderbox? (And
ideally for someone else to do the same investigation for buildbot?)
My sense is that both would be complex, but if I'm wrong about one or
both tools, then clearly that would suggest the next step for
investigation/implementation.

Luis