[tahoe-dev] shared fate policy on buildbot Re: v1.5.0 -- now with less apt-get! Re: v1.5.0 is feature-complete!

[Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn]

On Friday,2009-07-31, at 0:08 , Brian Warner wrote:

> (note that r4031 is the current trunk, but for whatever reason the  
> cygwin buildslave is offline and that's preventing our buildmaster  
> from making debs):

I guess I was doing Windows Update or cygwin upgrade or something and  
got called away and forgot to restart it.  I restarted the cygwin  
buildslave and it passed unit tests and the .deb's were built.

By the way, I really like the "shared fate policy" on the automatic  
building of packages.  That policy [1] is that packages don't get  
built for any platforms unless unit tests pass on all supported  
platforms.  That way when you download a package, you know you are  
getting a version that passed all tests on all platforms, not just on  
your platform.  It also means developers are forced to pay attention  
to all supported platforms, and not just their preferred platform.   
For example, I might not have noticed the cygwin buildslave being off- 
line if you hadn't mentioned it, and you might not have mentioned it  
if it wasn't preventing the .deb's from being built.

If this causes too much hassle, then that probably means we need to  
remove some platforms (such as cygwin) from the "Supported" category  
(or get more developers to contribute to the underloved platforms).   
As long as the set of platforms marked as "Supported" on the web  
pages really is the set of platforms that can cause developers to  
stop doing other things and pay attention when they fail, then I'm  
satisfied.

Regards,

Zooko

[1] http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/wiki/BuildbotPolicy