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

[Colin Snover]

Hi Travis,

Thank you for providing more insight, this was very helpful to me. I
apologise if the information was not completely clear initially and
sounded scarier than it was. I try my best to communicate effectively
and I understand that sometimes I fall short. I will continue to work on
this.

On 2017-12-21 16:42, Travis Howell wrote:
> Identical compilation environments been required for ScummVM porters
> on the new Buildbot was not clear in your initial message, and is very
> good to hear. That should avoid all the issues that have previously
> occurred from minor differences.
>
> If the new Buildbot compilation environments can be kept identical
> over the long term, and testing is based only from those Buildbot
> builds, it sounds like it should be safe enough, compared to manual
> releases.
>
> The Windows port of ScummVM 2.0.0 was more risk this time around, due
> to testing been based only off my Windows snapshots, and the final
> release version been based off an updated Buildbot, that had no
> outside testing. Hopefully that use of multiple compilation
> environments will never be required again.

I agree that the Windows release during this cycle was riskier than it
should have been. If I understand what you are saying, it sounds like we
both understand the value of ensuring that these Buildbot environments
are authoritative, so that the daily builds that our users are actually
running and testing with are identical to whatever eventually becomes
the final release. I too believe that it does no good for us to be
delivering broken (as with Buildbot’s SDL1 on Windows 10) builds for
testing.

Did you have any additional outstanding concerns that require additional
clarification? With this additional information, do you feel like it
makes sense to require these images to exist for all of our official
ports going forward, so that this build guarantee exists for all ports
we support in future?

Thanks,

-- 
Colin Snover
https://zetafleet.com