From octave-maintainers-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Sat Jan  4 12:47:20 2003
Subject: Re: Octave with non-gcc compilers and build testing
From: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
To: Paul Kienzle <pkienzle at users dot sourceforge dot net>
Cc: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>,    octave-maintainers mailing list <octave-maintainers@bevo.che.wisc.edu>
Date: Sat, 4 Jan 2003 12:47:15 -0600

On  4-Jan-2003, Paul Kienzle <pkienzle at users dot sourceforge dot net> wrote:

| John W. Eaton wrote:
| 
| >The main problem I see with the tinderbox idea is that we need to have
| >some poeple donate cycles.  We don't need anything fast, but we do
| >need some variety.  Currently, I can only offer to set up testing on
| >Debian x86 and Alpha systems, and perhaps a Sun system (though the
| >hardware is not mine, so I'm not sure I will be able to get away with
| >running compile jobs 24/7 on the machines I have access to).  So is
| >there any interest in helping to set somethign like this up and make
| >it work?
|
| Daily builds seem a little excessive.  Maybe weekly?  It would also be 
| nice if you could trigger
| it yourself when you want to release a new version.

The idea for more frequent builds (continuous for Mozilla) is that you
know almost immediately when a change results in a problem, so it is
easier to determine the cause.  Also, the Mozilla tinderbox client
apparently does

  forever
    {
      cvs update
      make
      mail log file to server
    }

this assumes that make can rebuild and rerun configure scripts, but we
should probably fix that problem in Octave's makefiles anyway.  Using
CVS to update the sources instead of downloading complete tar files
will generally mean faster builds but it doesn't test the distribution
process, so it would be nice to also be able to ask the tinderbox
clients to download tar files and build from those.

The server collects the log files and generates the web page that
makes it easy to see whether a problem exists.  I would modify the
client loop to be more like

  forever
    {
      cvs update
      if (no changes)
	{
	  wait a while
	}
      else
	{
	  make
	  mail log file to server
	}
    }

to avoid lots of pointless running of make and cvs update, but
otherwise, I don't see a problem with having something like this
running all the time, with "wait a while" being something like 30
minutes.

| It might also be nice if 3rd party packages could build and test. 

It seems that it wouldn't be too hard to set up additional software
for testing once you have the basic tinderbox stuff set up.

jwe