Jenkins is pretty much dead in the water these days; a test run that works is a rare miracle rather than the default state. Which also means most patches are being +1'd in even though patches are failing, with comments like "the test failures are probably unrelated"
I think everyone has to be grateful that I'm not volunteering to be release manager for 2.8, as if I were i'd have already imposed a block on any patches going in until jenkins was stable. That is: nothing but test fixes would go in. as it is, at least for the next couple of weeks, I'm going to experiment with reverting patches which break the build. Usually those breakages are being fixed, eventually, with followup patches. With a "patches which break the build get reverted" policy, whoever submitted that first patch gets to write the fix *and test it again*. This should encourage people to be more rigorous first time round. 1. Yes, I'm going to have to be ruthless and do this for myself too. Or others can. I'm not doing much (any?) core hadoop coding right now, so more isolated. 2. No, I don't plan to show favouritism: break the build and it gets rolled back. 3. We can review this in a week or two to see how it goes. And someone else can volunteer to keep jenkins happy. 4. I'll get a smaller fix for HDFS-9263 in. 5. I've also started running slider 0.90-SNAPSHOT test runs with Hadoop 2.8.0-SNAPSHOT, so I'm being the first to find problems beyond jenkins. So far HADOOP-12050 is the first blocker. It went in in August, which shows we aren't doing enough cross-version testing beyond just Jenkins. That breakage (HADOOP-12587) is stopping my test code working against secure clusters —if I was being really harsh I'd have reverted that too, but's been in long enough I think a fix is probably the best solution. 6. Finally: everyone should feel free to fix tests. Don't be shy now! Giving this is a US vacation week, it should be a quieter week for breakages. Sorry —but if we can't even get Jenkins stable, then what hope do we have for a 2.8 release working? -Steve
