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

[Travis Howell]

On 21/12/2017 1:47 PM, Colin Snover wrote:
> To me, the biggest argument for such a requirement is that the bus
> factor on these ports is really low, usually just one person. Making
> sure we always have a worker image helps to reduce the risk of dead
> ports by ensuring that at least the build process for all of the
> “official” (i.e. in our tree) ports is documented, reproducible, and
> (strongly preferably) updatable, so binaries can be created by
> automation or any other team member instead of relying on a single
> person. There are at least four examples I can point to that indicate a
> real need for this kind of strict requirement for any of our official ports:
>
> 2. When the usual Windows porter was lost around the 1.9 release time,
> there was apparently a non-trivial amount of time & effort needed to get
> a working build system up and running again, and then I essentially had
> to re-do this work yet again to update Buildbot, which just wastes the
> core team’s limited time;

I really need to clarify this point, Eugene asked via email whether I 
could provide a Windows build with WinSparkle support for ScummVM 1.9.0. 
I responded quickly that another developer would be required for 
WinSparkle support, since I disagreed with pushing untested updates, and 
MinGW lacked the required API support for compiling WinSparkle at the 
time. As usual I get no response at all, and only see complaints on IRC 
later. I confirmed the compilation guide for MinGW still worked at the 
time, other than a broken link or two. The requested Windows build for 
Windows 9x/ME I provided (still online at 
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B7wJOP5u3deTRi0wZ2RNTzAwNkU ), was 
never even added to the web site either.

I could have easily continued to provide working Windows release 
binaries, if people would were more interested in providing a stable 
release build, rather than pushing untested updates to people.

I still think using buildbot for release builds is a bad idea in 
general, unless the build environment on buildbot matches the build 
environment used by the porter exactly. Otherwise there is the chance of 
problems due to different compiler parts been used, especially in the 
case of cross-compilation. It has happened a few times in the past with 
the Windows port, due to those differences.

On a side note, I'm still waiting for a response to my email about 
whether Windows XP support still works in the Windows build of ScummVM 
2.0.0, since it was mentioned as been built with mingw-w64. mingw-w64 
dropped Windows XP support, according to note on the mingw-w64 
compilation guide on the ScummVM wiki.