On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 7:11 AM, Eloy Duran <eloy.de.en...@gmail.com> wrote: > I wouldn't be bothered by these CI emails if we'd see one every now > and then. But nowadays, it seems like every other build is broken. > That's the real problem here.
Thanks for the feedback, everyone. FWIW, this is not new, build failures used to go to this list [1] However, not fixing the build promptly is a problem, and one of the reasons I wanted to reinstate notifications to this list. On a large/distributed project like Rails - especially one where many people run the master branch live in their projects - I believe there are exactly three appropriate responses to a broken build, in order of decreasing desirability: 1. Fix the failing tests, ASAP 2. Roll back the change which broke the tests, ASAP 3. Comment/disable the failing tests, ASAP Any other response to a broken build is wrong and lazy, and leads to broken windows [2]. See my longer rant here: [3] Now, it is FINE for the build to go red once in a while, especially for an open source project like Rails. It is not reasonable to expect the core team to run the full suite before every checkin, on every supported database and Ruby interpreter. That would be a waste of their valuable time and effort, and is why we set up CI to do it automatically. However, LEAVING the build red is NOT fine. Spamming the list and annoying people is just a symptom of the real problem, which is not promptly resolving a broken build. Fixing the symptom by hiding the problem (sending failure emails to a separate list) is counterproductive, and only exacerbates the broken-window effect. Anyway, I've disabled the notifications for now, and the core team has the ability to disable them anytime they want as well [4]. I didn't disable them because people complained, but because we just got a new suite of servers donated to set up an awesome, multi-branch, multi-interpreter Rails CI environment (thanks EngineYard!), and I have to complete that migration/setup. [1] http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-core/browse_thread/thread/2b610e77506812c0# [2] http://www.pragprog.com/the-pragmatic-programmer/extracts/software-entropy [3] http://pivots.pivotallabs.com/users/chad/blog/articles/484-how-you-can-learn-to-stop-worrying-and-love-continous-integration [4] http://github.com/rails/rails/blob/master/ci/cruise_config.rb#L4 --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Core" group. To post to this group, send email to rubyonrails-core@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rubyonrails-core+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-core?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
