[Scummvm-devel] The new Buildbot: what’s happening, what needs to happen

[john.willis at distant-earth.com]

Hi Colin,

Just wanted to say thank you for all this work. 

As far as getting a much more automated, upgradable and repeatable build model in place this is fantastic. That said, I have a few comments :).

* All compilers have been updated; the oldest is now GCC 4.9.1

A lot of the older, but still supported, platforms on buildbot use older toolchains and for various reasons (2.4 kernels, ancient LibC's, hardware, weird SDK's etc.) are going to struggle to get up to that sort of level. 
Nothing we have is in the old 2.95 type territory but if we are going to set a baseline for GCC we may have to drop some ports.

That said, most of the compilers I use for my ports that are on older GCC's are either already in Docker containers or chroots so I'll have a go at packaging them up for this. I can't really see it being much of a problem and if we wanted to bump the minimum GCC that would be more of a project level decision anyway.

* New packages are generated immediately upon successful build, instead of only once nightly

Great. One thing I also added to my local hacks with this a year or so back was creating builds with --enable-release set on a weekly basis as an 'advanced user snapshot' in addition to the CI builds.

* Manual builds using different configure flags can be triggered from the admin panel

Cool, ok, that is really nice to have.

* [Policy change] Pending approval, porters will be responsible for maintaining their own containers moving forward

Great move.

* [Policy change] Pending approval, ports in the master branch will need to have a Buildbot worker

I can't say I agree with this. It raises the barrier to entry a fair bit. That said, it is not hard to get the containers working. My concerns are more around stuff that is just not going to work in this environment.

That said, maybe the right thing to do is STRONGLY encourage it, link it into the Wiki info panels for each port etc. and make it clear it is a really desirable feature for ports. 

See how that goes any maybe make it mandatory at a future point.

Thanks,

John