Status of Harbormaster

[Ben Gamari]

Hello everyone,

Over the last few weeks I have been gradually pushing away at increasing
our Harbormaster coverage. I'm happy to report that Harbormaster should
now test commits on,

 * x86_64 Ubuntu Linux
 * x86_64 Mac OS X Sierra
 * x86_64 Windows (although the bugs are still being worked out here)

Differentials are tested on,

 * x86_64 Ubuntu Linux
 * x86_64 Windows

For those of you following along at home I've roughly documented the
configuration on the Phabricator Wiki [1].

One open question is whether we want to enable Differential building on
the OS X box. The security implications of allowing essentially
anonymous users to build and run untrusted code in our own CI
environment are already quite sticky; to enable Differential building on
the OS X box would mean that we would be running untrusted code on
someone else's hardware, which seems like it may be a step too far.
It would be nice to find a way to extend Differential builds to other
platforms in the future, however, so we can ensure that we catch bad
patches before they even make it to the tree.


It's a bit unclear how far we should extend test coverage. In the future
I think I will at very least add an i386 Ubuntu environment, but we
could go farther still. For instance these platforms immediately come to
mind,

 * x86_64 FreeBSD
 * x86_64 Solaris
 * ARM Linux (although this could be quite tricky given the speed of
   these machines)
 * AArch64 Linux

There is certainly a maintenance and complexity tradeoff that comes with
extending our coverage like this, however, so it's quite unclear where
the right compromise lies. I'd love to hear what you think.

Happy hacking,

- Ben


[1] https://phabricator.haskell.org/w/ghc_harbormaster/
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