[Python-Dev] "Buildbot" category on the tracker

[R. David Murray]

On Fri, 30 Oct 2009 at 09:57, "Martin v. Löwis" wrote:
>> But the real reason for having a buildbot category (or at least a keyword)
>> would be to be able to tag all bugs that are currently making buildbots
>> fail that are _not_ the result of a recent checkin.  This would make
>> the task of finding the bugs that need to be cleaned up to stabilize
>> the buildbot fleet easier.  I'm currently aware of issues 4970, 3892,
>> and 6462 in this category, and there are a few more that we can/will file
>> if we continue to pay attention to the failure reports now arriving on
>> the irc channel.
>
> That's convincing; I've created a "buildbot" keyword. I gave it the
> description
>
>  "indicates that tests fail on a buildslave for uncertain reasons"
>
> If that is indeed the intended purpose of this classification, please
> keep it in mind when assigning the tag. If I misunderstood the purpose
> of the keyword, please provide a better description.

How about:
     "indicates that related test failures are causing buildbot
     instability"

My thought is that sometimes we more-or-less know the reasons for the
failure, but for one reason or another we can't fix it immediately, and
I'd like to keep such a bug visible when looking at buildbot related
issues.

IMO it would be no bad thing for this tag to be applied to any issue
that is created as a result of an observed test failure on a buildbot.
Such an issue should only get created if the person who did the checkin
that caused it can't reproduce the problem themselves (ie: they ran
the test suite and on their platform it was clean).  Now, we know that
in practice some bugs show up on buildbots because a committer forgot
to run the test suite prior to check in (we all make mistakes), but if
such a bug gets tagged 'buildbot' I think that's fine, since it will
still be affecting the stability of the buildbots.

--David