Re: Cruise Control to mitigate failure in make bootstrap?

[Alan Mackenzie]

On Sat, Apr 12, 2008 at 03:02:57PM +0100, Jason Rumney wrote:
> Alan Mackenzie wrote:
> >I have used this product in one of my day jobs, and it works well.

> I suspect it works well in a day job environment, when you are working
> for the same 8 hours a day as the other developers on the project.  I
> suspect it works less well for Free Software where volunteers might
> have a haf hour to spare so they fix a bug, don't have time to do a
> full bootstrap before checking in, then might not see any mail
> generated because they are offline for the weekend.

Well, it wouldn't be worse than what we currently have.

Having seen the program (which is free software, after all) work so well,
I think it would work just as well for the Emacs project.  How long would
a make bootstrap take on a suitable server?  10 minutes?  Possibly 2
minutes?  That's not terribly long to wait to check that a change just
committed hasn't fouled things up.

I've just a look at my emacs-devel archive, and since mid January 2008,
there are 26 threads with subject line "bootstrap fails".  That's an
awful lot of inconvenience to an awful lot of people.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).