This was originally an off-list objection on my part, but Zooko pointed
out that it could be useful for the whole list :-)

On Tue, Aug 04, 2009 at 14:07:39 -0600, Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn wrote:
> Way to go!  Good luck getting solid buildbots working.
>
> Honestly, I don't want to point fingers, but I lost motivation to  
> maintain buildslaves or buildmaster because I perceived the darcs  
> developers as not caring too much if they broke the tests or if they  
> wrote code which had no tests.

I take exception to that (and just in case this is ambiguous, I'm
actually saying this very mildly).

The buildbots were just too expensive to maintain:
- each config change required an email roundtrip
- the windows slave kept getting stuck, and getting it unstuck
  required an email roundtrip
- every time the config requirements changed, eg. new dependencies,
  everything would break, and we'd have

And they were also noisy
- failures due to slaves being lost

And sometimes not noisy enough
- new failures being hidden behind old failures

Don't get me wrong; we want the buildbots to work, but after a while, we
also got tired and demotivated.  There was too much banging on drums
followed by crickets chirping.

I hope that (a) having somebody within the darcs team run the
buildmaster and (b) requiring either maintained buildbots (say 24h
response time) or ssh access for the darcs team and (c) finding some
technical solution to the configuration change problem (eg. cabal
install --deps-only) will help us move forward quicker.

Thanks! :-)

-- 
Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow>
PGP Key ID: 08AC04F9

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