[GHC DevOps Group] CircleCI question

[Ben Gamari]

Hi Jonas,

I'm hoping that you can perhaps shed light on the status of this build
[1] as the interface is a bit perplexing. All at once the interface
suggests that:

 * The build has "failed" and finished 23 minutes ago

 * "There was an issue while running this container and it was rerun."
   Note the use of past tense, perhaps
   suggesting that the build was rerun and finished? The second sentence
   is quite mysterious; is the "most recent run" the failed run or the

 * "The most recent run is shown." Presumably this is the re-run.

 * The build is still running.

I honestly am not sure what I am supposed to do with information.
It sounds as though there was an infrastructure issue on their end,
causing the last attempted build to fail and resulting in a rerun, which
is still ongoing. However, the email notification they sent claimed that
there was an unexpected exit code (seemingly during the test step):

    ------
    Failed
    ------

    Uh-oh, this build did not succeed!

    ...

    ----------------
    Failing command:
    ----------------
    Command: Error executing build steps
    Exit code:  n/a

    ------
    Output
    ------
    Unexpected error running build task: exit status 255


    -----------------------------------------
    The rest of your commands were successful
    -----------------------------------------

      Spin up Environment
      Checkout code
      prepare-system
      submodules
      Boot
      Configure
      Build

In general I'm a bit confused as to why they are notifying us of
spurious build failures.

Have you seen this sort of behavior before? Does the above
interpretation sound correct? Is there any way to reduce the volume of
notifications to *only* actual failed builds?

Cheers,

- Ben


[1] https://circleci.com/gh/ghc/ghc/389
    Screenshot here: http://home.smart-cactus.org/~ben/circleci.png
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