June 5, 2005
Experimental Tinderbox
I've gotten favourable responses on what I've labelled Tinderbox's experimental version. Enough so that I've decided to push forward on getting my changes into the main scripts. The first step: complete the work I started on the experimental view. I finished that up tonight while Firefly played in the background. Next step: clean up and modularize the changes. Shiny.
Below, Doug asks what the changes are and why I've made them. The latest changes I've introduced alter the standard Tinderbox display so that the end of a build cell is marked at the time when the build itself ended. Where before the graphical display would punt on the build's end time, letting the build cell "slide" up to the next time a build started on that system, this display is more honest about when builds start and stop on a system. The grey spaces seen in this experimental version indicate a period of inactivity on that build tree.
For example, pacifica has grey spaces on its build because after it is finished building Firefox on the trunk it builds Firefox on the Aviary 1.0.1 branch. Take a look at both of those build trees side-by-side and you'll see that where the grey spaces appear in pacifica's column, there is a corresponding build on pacifica in the other tree.
I and others have found this simple change to be powerful and informative. While my motivation for doing it was simply to provide myself with more information about what is actually happening on the build farm, the feature has proven to be more popular with people in our community than I'd expected (ie, instead of not receiving feedback about this work people have indicated their liking).
As stated above, I'll work with the goal of getting this feature into the main Tinderbox webtool display so that it's in the mainline code distribution for others to see and use.
Comments
What are the changes (and why?) I see lots more times, and lots of grey which didn't exist before.
Also - any chance of making the output valid HTML?
Posted by: Doug Wright at June 5, 2005 4:54 AM
Say Chase, you've recently said that the win32 firefox installer is supposed to get talkback all the time, but it doesn't!
Only the nightly builds get it, but the hourly ones don't.
Can you please explain, it is frustrating not having talkback :(
Posted by: Caleb at June 5, 2005 8:32 AM
Doug, the current version of the tinderbox scripts lie a bit to you. Instead of showing the exact time when a tinderbox is compiling a build, it fudges things and just shows the break between compiles. The gray in the new version is the time between builds, which makes it a lot easier to see e.g., which checkins actually made a build, and exactly when a build started and stopped.
Posted by: Blake Kaplan at June 5, 2005 10:06 AM
Do the tinderboxen then make a break between the builds?
Posted by: mcsmurf at June 5, 2005 12:09 PM
mcsmurf, many of the Tinderbox systems are configured to build more than one tree. For example, pacifica will build Firefox on the trunk and after that's complete it will build Firefox on the Aviary 1.0.1 branch. The grey space on the Firefox trunk tree is the period of time when the system is busy building other trees.
The grey space is more pronounced on systems like patrocles, crazyhorse, and balsa, which build as many as 3 to 4 trees in a cycle, one at a time.
Posted by: Chase at June 5, 2005 12:55 PM
Caleb, only the release builds are meant to have Talkback. The technical problems we experienced would be when those release builds had some miscommunication with the Talkback server. The problem would result in the Talkback client not being included in that build.
It's infeasible for us at this time to have every hourly build include Talkback. Each one that does generates a set of symbols that range from 100 to 350 MB. Where we have the disk space to hold symbols for something like 15 builds a night for 20 days, we simply don't have the disk space to hold 20 times that amount.
Developers needing debugging symbols to do their work usually build debug trees locally on their systems. This saves them the round trip with the Talkback server and gives them the ability to use a debugger to troubleshoot problems, as well.
I have a post stored about the recent Talkback fixes, btw. I'll be making that live soon.
Posted by: Chase at June 5, 2005 1:02 PM
Thanks for making it clear Chase :)
But unlike the hourly installer builds, the hourly _zip_ builds do include talkback. What's the difference?
Posted by: Caleb at June 5, 2005 6:28 PM
Note that the grey areas aren't visible on my Mac iBook - they almost look like white (gamma-correction blablabla).
Posted by: jhermans at June 6, 2005 1:53 AM
Any chance of suppressing the meaningless odd seconds of grayness between successive builds?
Posted by: Neil at June 6, 2005 2:29 AM