From octave-maintainers-request at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu Sat Jan  4 19:33:02 2003
Subject: Re: Octave with non-gcc compilers and build testing
From: Paul Kienzle <pkienzle at users dot sourceforge dot net>
To: "John W. Eaton" <jwe at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu>
Cc: Paul Kienzle <pkienzle at users dot sourceforge dot net>,    octave-maintainers mailing list <octave-maintainers@bevo.che.wisc.edu>
Date: Sat, 04 Jan 2003 20:33:31 -0500

John W. Eaton wrote:

>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.
>
With more people working, this may make more sense.  Since it is mostly 
just you, though, I can't
imagine there will be that much difficulty sorting out the causes of 
build problems.

Plus you are more likely to get spare cycles if the supplier of the 
cycles can determine how
frequently they want to rebuild things.

>this assumes that make can rebuild and rerun configure scripts, but we
>should probably fix that problem in Octave's makefiles anyway.  
>
I prefer a less conservative rebuild process in general because 
sometimes I don't want to
wait for everything to recompile just because of minor configure changes 
for a separate
environment.

>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.
>
Distribution is by snapshots.  Most people are not building from CVS. 
 You want more frequent
builds than that.  I think it is reasonable for tinderboxes to 
reconfigure when configure.in changes,
but other than that CVS seems reasonable.  Maybe a forced make 
clean/reconfigure every so
often just to make sure things are consistent.

Paul Kienzle
pkienzle at users dot sf dot net