[gentoo-project] Tinderbox and building everything

[Patrick Lauer]

On Friday 09 May 2014 17:43:43 hasufell wrote:
> I used to believe it's lack of manpower/time or even laziness, but I am
> not sure anymore.
>
> blah blah tinderbox

So, as someone who has done lots of package building in the past ...

My actual "tinderbox" was 12 lines of bash, split over two files. It's 
absolutely not a technical problem.

On my old hardware (dualcore amd64) I generated about 1k package build logs a 
day, with my current hardware that should easily be 5k logfiles.

Now the "building" part is relatively boring, but now you have the logfiles, 
you should do something with them. My heuristic was to grep for "Error:" at 
the beginning of a line, that was unique enough that I only saw two false 
positives so far. On a good day that was about 150 files to process.

(There's some interesting setup issues that you'll encounter, but most of 
those can be scripted away, e.g. some packages need kernel sources -> emerge 
gentoo-sources; cd /usr/src/linux; make defconfig modules_prepare )

With an optimized workflow I could get my processing time to around one minute 
per logfile on average, my personal best was filing 160 bugs in 90 minutes. This 
is a lot of tedious work - and I stopped doing it once Flameeyes was doing the 
same and we had about 90% "the same" bugs, thus making my work redundant 
enough that it wasn't worth the time.

THAT is the bottleneck - getting people motivated to triage logs (which can be 
automated quite far) and file bugs (which is demotivating and exhausting). You 
fix that problem and the rest is easy ...

If you expect this to happen in any reasonable way ... either pay me to do it 
(I have the experience, but not the time), motivate others (hahaha), or do it 
yourself.

Have fun,

Patrick