Re: March gcc 3.0 and 3.1 Bootstraps Fail 34% of Time

[Nathan Sidwell <nathan at codesourcery dot com>]

Jeffrey Oldham wrote:

>         43% success                                     60% success
This is really bad. 

Over this last month, I've virtually stopped doing
gcc work, because of the difficulty of building. I'm very cautious about
checking in patches and test them, get them approved, test them again,
then check them in. Also to stop myself getting out of sync, I commit
patches for both branches at the same time - so both need to build.

Now, I fully expect the tree to break occasionally, but what I don't
expect is a single breakage to last for days *whatever the cause*. My
preference would be for no more than 24 hours - 48 hours tops. It
is annoying for there to be multiple single day outages as there seem
to have been for the last month too. In general, after the tree's broken
and then fixed, I'm even more careful about commits so as to not
immediately break it again.

This month I've had gcc users (who've had good reasons to want the latest
CVS) ask me which date they should check out of CVS to get a build,
because they've been unable to bootstrap. My answer's had to be
'sometime in February', and that does not reflect well.

> The GCC Steering Committee should adopt a desired rate of successful
> bootstrapping and testing to facilitate code correctness and
> development.  If the GCC community agrees with this decision,
> processes to ensure the rate is met will evolve and then be adopted by
> the Steering Committee as policy.
Yes. There should be an acceptable time limit on patches which happen
to break important builds.

> CAVEATS:
> 3) These comments reflect my own views, not CodeSourcery's views, and
> have not been reviewed by or discussed with anyone else at
> CodeSourcery.
ditto

nathan

-- 
Dr Nathan Sidwell   ::   http://www.codesourcery.com   ::   CodeSourcery LLC
         'But that's a lie.' - 'Yes it is. What's your point?'
nathan@codesourcery.com : http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~nathan/ : nathan@acm.org