Happy New BuildBot

[Sergio Durigan Junior <sergiodj@redhat.com>]

Hi there,

After spending some weeks playing with, tweaking and (sometimes)
fighting against BuildBot, I think I finally reached a state when I can
talk about using it for our project in an "official" way.

The purpose of our BuildBot is to build every commit made to the
repository, test it, and check for regressions.  Hopefully, it will help
us catch them very quickly.

First of all, I would like to thank Tom Tromey because he was the one
who started to tackle this problem long ago, in 2011.  To start my
investigations, I used his previous work at
<https://github.com/tromey/gdb-buildbot>.  Although I had to change most
of the master configuration file, the code to compare the test results
is almost the same.  Thanks, Tom!

Now, the current configuration can be found at
<http://git.sergiodj.net/?p=gdb-buildbot.git;a=summary>.  I intend to
submit it to gdb-patches when I have most of the bureaucracy figured
out, and it will live in the gdb/contrib directory.

I have also moved the old BuildBot page on our wiki (it is now called
FeaturesForBuildBot), and I am currently using the BuildBot page to
write about our yet-to-be-released BuildBot:
<https://sourceware.org/gdb/wiki/BuildBot>.  This page will be expanded
when I have most of the bureaucracy figured out, as well.

I'm talking to Frank in order to determine the best way to run our
buildmaster.  I'm not sure Sourceware's server is a good place, but
we'll see.  I expect to have this solved until mid-January.

Unfortunately, right now I'm running our BuildBot inside Red Hat's
network, so it's only accessible through VPN.  Meanwhile, you guys can
take a look at an existing BuildBot instance running for WebKit:

  <https://build.webkit.org/waterfall>

Ours will look more or less like this.  Our BuildBot will also send
e-mails to gdb-testers every time it sees a regression.  The e-mail will
look like:

  <http://people.redhat.com/sdurigan/buildbot.txt>

Unfortunately, GDB's testsuite has some racy testcases that can pollute
those logs; it will take some time until we filter them.  And there is
also an IRC bot that can be enabled, if people are interested.

You might also want to start considering offering some buildslaves for
our BuildBot, of course :-).

Opinions and suggestions are welcome, modulo I don't plan to spend too
much time implementing big things now.

-- 
Sergio
GPG key ID: 0x65FC5E36
Please send encrypted e-mail if possible
http://sergiodj.net/