gcc11-devel and our buildbots

[Chris Jones]

Hi

Before arm came along the gccdevel ports indeed did not update that regularly. Normally in the run up to a new major release they might see more activity, as we take a look as to if the upcoming release has any issues, but outside that they perhaps would go a month or two between updates. Arm changed that in that currently its still the version with the best support for that platform, as none of the production releases have official support. I suspect once these stabilise, with a production gcc release with full arm support, we will likely go back to the old update patterns.

Chris

> On 30 Dec 2021, at 1:10 pm, Christopher Nielsen <mascguy at rochester.rr.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>> 
>>> It seems like we’re updating this port at least weekly. With the result being that our Intel buildbots are routinely bogged down for a long time, sometimes as long as 4-5 hours.
>>> 
>>> While I understand that we want to follow upstream’s progress - particularly for the ARM version - is this really necessary for Intel?
>> 
>> The reality is even worse, as libgcc-devel takes as long to build - if not longer - than gcc-devel. So net-net, our Intel buildbots are routinely being tied up for 8+ hours on each update.
> 
> After sleeping on this, it’s apparent that my e-mails from yesterday weren’t quite as constructive as one might hope. And they could also be construed as critical, which wasn’t my intention.
> 
> So let me start with this: I totally respect - and appreciate! - that we’re closely following upstream. Particularly if anyone is using ‘gccdevel’ for cross-compilation, targeting evolving architectures like RISC-V. (And support for things like the latter are likely occurring at a rapid pace.)
> 
> That said, I’m wondering whether it might make sense to curb our updates slightly... perhaps limiting them to a twice-monthly update cadence? That would still ensure that we’re able to provide leading-edge toolchain components, without quite as much impact to our buildbot resources.
> 
> Ultimately, I’m not opposed to weekly updates, particularly if there is a strong need and/or demand for it. But it would help to know how we decide on which commit we choose, when updating such a port. For example, does upstream bless beta releases on a certain day of the week, and/or with certain commits? Etc.
> 
> Thoughts on all of the above?