Suggestion: Use Buildbot

[Simon Marlow]

Ian Lynagh wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 30, 2006 at 01:20:48PM +0100, Simon Marlow wrote:
> 
>>Ian, what do you think?
> 
> 
> I've had a little play with it, and it does indeed seem nice.
> 
> In particular, it makes it quite easy to extract the testsuite summary,
> as well as a the bits of the log corresponding to the failures, and
> making them available separately to the complete log.

I find it useful to have summaries posted to the mailing list, so we can go back 
through the archives and find the point when a test started failing, that sort 
of thing.  I presume that's possible too?

> The results of my playing are at:
>      http://urchin.earth.li/~ian/buildbot/
> (this is just a snapshot of the real thing, which isn't accessible. Only
> the links in the top left "run testsuite" box will work).

Looks cool!

> I think we'll still want to have per-slave scripts in the ghc-nightly
> repo, as that seems nicer than having to fiddle with the master whenever
> you want to change details of one slave. Something like pre-build
> (things like making mk/build.mk and setting up paths) and post-build
> (putting the tarballs somewhere accessible) maybe.

Sure.  I like it that our nightly builds test more than just a standard build - 
e.g. including unregisterised libraries, the stage 3 build, we use the 
compacting collector when building stage 3, etc. etc.

We could have a round-the-clock fast build: tune the build for speed, don't 
include extralibs, just do a fast testsuite run, and perhaps do this on multiple 
platforms, I think it would be a big win.  I can probably find some suitable 
machines here.

Cheers,
	Simon