[Dart] Proposed changes to Nightly targets

[Bill Lorensen]

Our e-mail connectivity at GE is down.

At 09:50 AM 7/26/01 -0400, Ken Martin wrote:
>The Update.html for vtk doesn't seem to be working. update.tmp is correctly generated and update.xml is started but then it seems that the Tcl script dies/crashes (with an error reported to Dan? via email?) Any ideas on what is killing this?
>  
>Thanks
>Ken
>  
>  
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: dart-admin at public.kitware.com [mailto:dart-admin at public.kitware.com]On Behalf Of Miller, James V (CRD)
>>Sent: Tuesday, July 24, 2001 10:22 AM
>>To: Dart (E-mail)
>>Subject: [Dart] Proposed changes to Nightly targets
>>
>>Ken, Bill, and I were discussing changing Dart in the following ways:
>>  
>>1. Move the dashboards start time from 3am EST to 11pm EST
>>  
>>     Motivation:
>>        This would allow people in Europe to submit dashboards that they can use.  They could start their builds at 6am and hopefully finish before they got into work.
>>  
>>     Solution: 
>>         Modify existing cron jobs on servers to open/close the dashboard.  Clients still have the flexibility to run their jobs at a time that is convenient for them.  But we should strive to have results on the Dashboards early enough to be useful to Europe.
>>             
>>         Modify Update.tcl to specify a different time for an update
>>         
>>         We should probably parameterize Update.tcl so that a given project can decide for itself when Nighly dashboards will be done.
>>  
>>     Impact:
>>         Eastern US would have to check in changes to be tested by nightly dashboard to 11pm. Western US would have to check in changes to be tested by nightly dashboard 8pm.
>>  
>>         Does this impact dashboard rollups, navigations, or datestamps? I think datestamps are based on GMT.  So moving from 3am EST to 11pm EST will not cause a change in date in GMT.
>>  
>>         
>>2. make Nightly should do an Update
>>  
>>     Motivation:
>>        Clients current have to do a 
>>             make DashboardStart
>>             make Nightly
>>  
>>         While servers have to do a
>>             make DashboardStart
>>             make DashboardEnd
>>  
>>         This will be confusing to people setting up clients because they need to run a server operation (DashboardStart) before they do a client operation (make Nightly) but they never run the matching server operation DashboardEnd.
>>  
>>     Solution:
>>         "make Nightly" target should always do an update.  
>>  
>>         Clients can then just do a "make Nightly".
>>  
>>         Servers would still do 
>>                make DashboardStart
>>                make DashboardEnd
>>  
>>         make DashboardStart would still generate Update.xml for the server's Dashboard tree
>>  
>>         Client's should generate an Update.xml and put it in the Sites tree.  This will allow us to summarize the changes that appear for each build (Nightly or Experimental).  This is vital for Experimental builds (we can determine whether this is a continuous build and what changed) and is nice for Nightly builds (so we can verify that all builds actually succeeded in performing the update).
>>  
>>         Overall, we are striving to separate the client operation from the server operation.  So people that just want to submit to the dashboard have the "simplest" task.  People running Dart servers, have a little more to do but there is a clear distinction on what is a client operation and what is a server operation.
>>  
>>     Impact:
>>         Shared source builds would have multiple updates being run on the same tree.  Probably not a big deal since cvs should properly lock/unlock so one machine would do the update and the others would have an up to date tree. We can finess this problem by building in some delays in our shared source builds.
>>  
>>  
>>I'll attack these in the next few days. I may wait until we label our alpha for Insight before I change Dart.
>>  
>>  
>>Jim Miller 
>>_____________________________________
>>Visualization & Computer Vision
>>GE Corporate Research & Development
>>Bldg. KW, Room C218B
>>P.O. Box 8, Schenectady NY 12301
>>
>>millerjv at crd.ge.com <<mailto:millerjv at crd.ge.com>mailto:millerjv at crd.ge.com>
>>(518) 387-4005, Dial Comm: 8*833-4005, 
>>Cell: (518) 505-7065, Fax: (518) 387-6981 
>>
>>