Build Master: Scheduling II

[Jacob Carlborg]

On 2013-12-04 20:52, Brad Roberts wrote:

> I'm not sure this is really a good goal any more.  The overlap between
> testing and releasing isn't as big as I originally thought.  Add to that
> that the very definition of what a release is is in question.  The only
> overlap that really exists is that there's a set of boxes that exist and
> that they build in somewhat similar ways.

I have only ever thought that the autotester provides multiple different 
platforms which we could build the tools and create the releases[1] on.

What I see as the advantage is:

* The autotester is always available

* Not a single person need to have all different platforms to create a 
release

* We don't need to rely on someone else to build packages for a given 
platform. He/she may be away for a few days and suddenly we can't get a 
release for a given platform

* It's reproducible. We're creating the release on the same machines 
every time

Just look at the last release. It doesn't include pre-compiled binaries 
for FreeBSD, because Walter's machine apparently can't build it anymore 
without running out of memory. That must never happen.

> But there's also a hell of a lot of differences.[SNIP]

I'm not saying that the autotester will just magically be able to build 
releases. I'm saying it provides the platforms we need (ok, seems to be 
missing one or two Linux distributions) to be able to build releases.

As you say, we don't yet have an automated process of creating releases. 
But when we're creating that (writing a script/tool) it need to support 
building on several different machines, then be able to collect the 
result (cross-platform zip). We don't want to create a script that 
automates the release, then change all that when we won't it to run on 
the autotester machines.

BTW, I'm not sure we even can create an automate process without 
something like the autotester. We need to be able to build on all 
supported platforms. Sure, someone else might have a complete fleet of 
machines. It's not the autotester itself that is important, it's all the 
machines it runs on.

[1] When I say "release", in this case I'm referring to building the 
compiler, all the tools and libraries, packaging it in a platform 
specific installer and cross-platform zip.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg