launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Jonathan Lange <jml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 5:12 PM, Bjorn Tillenius <bjorn@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 11:06:48AM +1200, Michael Hudson wrote:
...
>
>> and also
>> because I think part of the point of being the BE is that it allows you
>> to get away from being distracted by the 1001 things we all have
>> pressing at us constantly.
>
> This might be true. However, I do think that build errors that aren't
> caused by real test failures (like the example above) should get really
> high priority to get fixed.
>

I agree.

However, I think it would be unwise to decide that these bugs are
categorically more important/urgent than improving the build system in
other ways. Michael has already repaid a huge amount of technical
debt, thus making it much easier to debug & fix these failures.

Also, there is something to be said for engineer discretion.

>
>>
>> Systemic issues that affect the reliable functioning of buildbot should
>> of course be very high priority build engineer issues -- but that's not
>> the same thing.
>
> ... right, you agree with my, I guess :) So we need to define what
> the responsibilites really are. I would say it's the build engineer's
> responsibility to go through the build failures, and pick up any failure
> that isn't a real test failure (e.g. intermittently failing tests don't
> fall into this category). He doesn't necessarily have to fix it himself,
> but he should make sure that a bug is filed about it, and that someone
> is looking into it.
>

I think we agree, but to be clear...

If the build is broken, you should fix it now, no matter who you are.
This counts for:
  - intermittent test failures (i.e. buggy tests)
  - intermittent build failures (i.e. buggy build system, like the
disk space thing)
  - someone has landing an actual broken branch (please don't do this)

The build engineer is not special wrt to this. The build engineer is
special in that they should be fixing the bugs in the build system
that are causing the intermittent build failures.

jml