[vtk-developers] [ANN] Buildbot updates

[Ben Boeckel]

Hi,

I wrote a blog post two weeks ago, but missed announcing it to the
lists:

    http://kitware.com/blog/home/post/984

It covers how to use the --regex-include and --regex-exclude arguments
to get more responsive results from buildbot.

Since the post, there have been other buildbot changes. This week, I
also added shortcuts for those two arguments: -i and -e, respectively.

A more disruptive change that has been discussed a bit would be to make
the --oneshot argument the default and instead switching around to using
--continuous instead to have "rebuild on push" behavior. So by default,
every push would need another "Do: test" to trigger a build. This would
help reduce the amount of clutter on the buildbots.

If no one objects, we'd like to turn off "@buildbot test" by the middle
of next week; I haven't seen any new uses of it, so disabling it will
only stop builders running when a branch is updated that haven't had a
"Do: test" (buildbot marks such instances when it comes across them).

The other buildbot comments ("builds have been queued" and the
end-of-build report comment) are also going away with another
improvement I've been working on. The idea is to use the CI integration
of GitLab for the status of builds (kwrobot has also started using it
for marking commits in a branch as good or bad as well as the last
commit in the branch for the branch itself). The UI looks something
like:

    https://gitlab.com/ben.boeckel/gitlab-ce/commit/80cda39c1bb966ff7aec05cb3b279e95c6ce2515/builds

to track the current status of the MR's testing and put a badge at the
top of the MR for its build status:

    https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests/1796

(For those curious, that MR is about allowing buildbot to specify more
information to GitLab to use other features such as cancelling builds
and restarting them, marking builds as known-to-fail, and other useful
information like a direct link to CDash.)

To help the process of getting green dashboards, I've also removed most
of our experimental builders (there are internal issues to add them back
once we work on getting them to pass). Those that are still there are
close to being green:

    https://buildbot.kitware.com/builders/vtk-megas-linux-shared-release%2Bqt%2Bqt5

(an OpenGL2 with Mesa tester; 4 failing tests) and:

    https://buildbot.kitware.com/builders/paraview-bigmac-osx-shared-debug%2Bclang%2Bgui%2Bopengl2%2Bpython

(ParaView + OpenGL2 tester).

Thanks,

--Ben