Re: [boost] Release Tools Analysis Part II: Developer Feedback Systems

From: Stefan Seefeld (seefeld_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-08-08 13:02:06

David Abrahams wrote:
> This part of my analysis focuses on the tools available for getting
> feedback from the system about what's broken.  Once again, because
> there's been substantial effort invested in dart/cmake/ctest and
> interest expressed by Kitware in supporting our use thereof, I'm
> including that along with our current mechanisms.  Although not
> strictly a reporting system, I'll also discuss BuildBot a bit because
> Rene has been doing some research on it and it has some feedback
> features.

I think it is important to consider the different tools for the purpose
they were designed for. None of them will do the whole job, but with
a good combination of them I believe very useful and robust things can
be built.

Notably, I do believe that buildbot is an invaluable tool to drive
the build and test automation. It provides a good framework to formalize
the process in, and it scales very well.

While it has some 'GUI' to visualize the state of the various builders,
I wouldn't think of using it to display test reports.

Generating test reports shouldn't be that hard, once you have all the
essential information that should figure in it. (That sounds banal, but
until recently wasn't even possible: there still is no way to figure out
what revision (or source tree timestamp) a given test run corresponds to !)

Once all that information is available in a machine-parsable form, writing
that last bit of code to generate a useful report (html or other) should
be straight-forward.

Regards,
                Stefan

-- 
      ...ich hab' noch einen Koffer in Berlin...