Nightlies

[Mateusz Kowalczyk]

On 26/01/14 11:16, Joachim Breitner wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Am Sonntag, den 26.01.2014, 02:22 +0000 schrieb Mateusz Kowalczyk:
>> I'd just like to query the status of the nightly builds. Is anything
>> happening in that area? [1] is right on the front page of the GHC Trac
>> even though no builds were ran for ~5 months. Perhaps it should be
>> moved out of the way if there's no plan to resume these in the near
>> future.
> 
> just to clarify: For what purpose do you want the nightlies? To check
> whether GHC validates cleanly, to compare performance numbers, or to get
> hold of up-to-date binary distributions?

Personally it's to see what validates that day and while we're at it, I
don't see the reason to not use this to get the nightly binaries as
well. I agree with pretty much everything that Páli said in his reply.

If we can get the validate results from other people's machines, at the
very least we have a sanity check: does it only fail for me or for
everyone else too? I think that if we have a list of platforms with
angry red everywhere, accessible to everyone, people are more likely to
react to build failures and we're less likely to have e-mails on
ghc-devs from people going ‘is it just me or is it failing for everyone?’.

> For the first, I’d really really like to see something that runs before
> a change enters master, so that non-validating mistakes like
> http://git.haskell.org/ghc.git/commitdiff/b26e2f92c5c6f77fe361293a128da637e728959c
> (without the corresponding change in 
> http://git.haskell.org/ghc.git/commitdiff/59f491a933ec7380698b776e14c3753c2a318a89)
> do not reach master in the first place.
> 
> I’m happy to help setting up such an infrastructure, including designing
> the precise workflow.

I think doing a per-commit validate before something enters master would
be difficult simply because one would have to wait a long time before
their commit is allowed in. Even on the fast boxes, the quick validate
from clean checkout seems to take about an hour at best.

> For the second and third, a build farm like the builders would of course
> be great. I actually once got a Igloo snowboall from Linaro for that
> purpose, but never finished setting it up properly. So once the builders
> are going to be revived, I’d like to finally do that.
> 
> 
> Greetings,
> Joachim
> 


-- 
Mateusz K.