ubuntu-phone team mailing list archive

[Robert Park <robert.park@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Nov 29, 2013 at 4:38 AM, Alexander Sack <asac@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 29, 2013 at 1:25 PM, Oliver Grawert <ogra@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> why would it matter at all if an image gets promoted ... in my ideal
>> world we would have builds triggered every time a change set enters from
>> proposed or at least every 2h ... only a minimal amount of these images
>> would be promoted at all, but we had a lot to pick the best one from ;)
>
> The reason for that is in a CI world we feed that image back so new
> merge proposals get tested on top of the most recent known good state.
> And this need to happen frequently, so folks don't test on outdated
> stuff etc.
>
> And yes, we currently don't have enough automation to be sure it's
> dogfood quality. But fixing that should be done through investing in
> more automation rather than changing the approach to put high latency
> manual and avengers activities into the middle of our rapid CI loop.

This is a really impressive level of double-speak, and I think it
needs to be called out.

Oliver is proposing a simple cron job that will increase the amount of
automation in the system, and reduce the amount of manual intervention
that is required for image builds. What you are proposing is a manual
system that requires a great degree of wasteful babysitting.

It seems that we all agree that the ideal scenario is trigger-based
image builds (ie, build a new image any time anything lands in the
archive). But until that system is in place, a high-frequency cron job
is undeniably closer to the ideal than the current system of needless
busywork heaped upon already-busy people.

And I have yet to hear any compelling arguments against cron. Please
stop suggesting that it is bad just because it is old. The linux
kernel is 23 years old, should we stop using that, too? cron is a tool
that exists, it is easily at our disposal, and has a proven track
record of reliability. Please, let's use it!