Inconsistent criteria of success on the buildbot

[Mojca Miklavec]

On 25 February 2016 at 11:22, Joshua Root wrote:
> On 2016-2-25 18:18 , Mojca Miklavec wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> A while ago I committed a new subport for geant4.10.2 which is
>> currently broken (in the meantime I lacked time/motivation to look
>> into it; and nobody else complained so far either):
>>      https://trac.macports.org/ticket/50426
>>
>> The initial builds failed, see for example:
>>
>> https://build.macports.org/builders/buildports-mtln-x86_64/builds/27442
>> but judging from
>>      http://packages.macports.org/geant4.10.2/
>> it seems as if the "build all ports" picked up and uploaded the
>> "broken" package with "no questions asked".
>>
>> Shouldn't this be fixed somehow? (Not just the port, but also the
>> behaviour.) Or did the package automagically start to work properly?
>>
>> I don't dare to even start parsing the logs from the all-ports build.
>> The progress log from the same buildslave
>>
>> https://build.macports.org/builders/buildports-mtln-x86_64/builds/28037/steps/compile/logs/progress
>> says "package found, not building again".
>
> That happens if installation succeeded but activation failed, or rev-upgrade
> failed afterwards. What behaviour are you wanting?

Good question.

I would expect:
- from the buildbot to send me an email about the failure (so that I
know that I have to look at it and fix it)
- consistency in uploading: either an upload or no upload of the
package in both build attempts

But I do realize that implementing the second might be tricky and
might add a lot of overhead to the process.

> For it to uninstall the
> port in this case?
>
> I agree it's not really ideal, but it does speed things up for users as
> archives are intended to do, even though in this case what they end up with
> is broken either way. And you'll need a version or revision bump to fix it,
> so uninstalling and attempting the build again in future doesn't really
> help.

The only thing that comes to my mind would be to flag a package when
it fails to build for one reason or another. In case a port is
flagged, the buildbot should try to at least activate the port and run
some sanity checks (if not rebuilding the port completely) to make
sure that the port is flawless.

On the other hand a package might become broken after a while if one
of its dependencies gets upgraded without revbumping the package. So
the situation is not much better in that case.

Mojca