launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Brad Crittenden <bac@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Feb 24, 2010, at 10:53 , Aaron Bentley wrote:

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> Brad Crittenden wrote:
>> https://dev.launchpad.net/WorkingWithReviews has been updated to reflect these changes.
> 
>> ec2 costs real money and only Canonical employees are currently
>> allowed to submit to PQM. For those reasons community contributors must
>> find a Canonical developer to test and land their changes
> 
> Could you explain this further?
> 
> I don't have an ec2 account.  I run the tests on my own machines, so for
> me to test a community contributor's branch, I would have to run it on
> my own machine.  Why shouldn't they run it on their machine?
> 
> Aaron

Hi Aaron,

We use ec2 because it is a shared, controlled environment that is not influenced by local configurations.  All developers are encouraged to run the full test suite before submitting to PQM.  Some don't always do that and that failure occasionally causes us to go into testfix mode (though it certainly isn't the only reason we enter testfix).  Personally I would never land another person's code unless I know for sure the test suite passed and the only way for me know is to run all of the tests.  And the easiest way for me to do that is using our tools to ship it off to ec2 and continue my work unimpeded.

Aaron you have access to ec2 but you choose not to use it.  Hopefully your objections will be addressed if we can begin to utilize the shared billing Amazon now offers or move our testing to an internal cloud.  Until then you'll either have to use your own resources or refuse to land branches for our community contributors.

Note that for me this view is not about a lack of trust.  In the past we used to have PQM run all of the tests before a commit.  We didn't do that because we didn't trust one another but because it provided a non-judgmental gatekeeper to help protect our code base from regression. When we moved to our "Five Minute PQM" setup the running of the tests was moved from a mechanical contract to a social contract.  Recognizing that not everyone had the local resources to always run the full suite we provide the ability to offload it to ec2.

--Brad