GSoC 2019 [Buildbot ideas]

[Mojca Miklavec]

Dear Rajdeep,

On Sun, 7 Apr 2019 at 19:41, Rajdeep Bharati wrote:
>
> I found something which might help us: https://bors.tech/homu-io/ https://github.com/barosl/homu.
> I will try it set it up on my local system and get back to you.
> Mojca

This sounds nice, but I wonder if it would actually address any of our
problems (I suspect not). Also, it explicitly says that the project
was kind of abandoned and continued elsewhere?

What this tool is trying to solve is to check the code again after
potentially long code review process, and run CI again "just before
merging". However some of our builds would take hours, or, well, on
Travis you might get 2 hours of waiting time and then one hour of
building, just to experience a timeout at the end anyway. This makes
the "just before merging" kind of not-too-well-defined. Plus, half of
our Travis failures are false negatives, and before this can be useful
on the buildbot, we would need to be able to enable checking pull
requests in a "safe way" (addendum: for such checking we could
probably just as well engage a couple of machines which are completely
decoupled from our main builders, which would run, say, just 10.5,
10.6, 10.9, and would not upload the results anywhere). When checking
the base ... we have so little activity that this is practically never
an issue. And with ports there are so many distinct ports, that this
is also hardly ever an issue; and when it is, you would already notice
that the PR cannot be merged.

Mojca