On Mon, Sep 11, 2017 at 09:09:06PM +0200, Harald Welte wrote:
Dear all,
for probably about a year (or longer) we have been putting up with VTY tests which cause builds to break under unclear circumstances. I personally believe the probability of a VTY test failing has recently increased again, and this is barely tolerable anymore. Often, rebasing/cherry-picking the given patch one or two times also doesn't work. Yet, the given patch-under-test is not even touching anything related to VTY, like In https://gerrit.osmocom.org/3899 which has failed in https://jenkins.osmocom.org/jenkins/job/OpenBSC-gerrit/2451/ and https://jenkins.osmocom.org/jenkins/job/OpenBSC-gerrit/2454/
I know Neels and others have spend already significant time in the past trying to resolve this - unsuccessfully.
So I think the situation has reached a point where we should disable the vty tests, or at least the specific part of the vty tests that is known to break most frequently.
I definitely want us to have *more* testing, not less. However, when the test itself is not stable yet - particularly after that much time - we cannot have that buggy test delay our development.
If there are no resources / noone with an assignment to actively maintain this, then it's reasonable to disable it, or at least disable the tests that are breaking things now.
I would vote for running those tests regularly (daily, every few hours, you name it), but not as part of the mandatory build verification for gerrit V+1.
I think this is fine, so we get fallout later on that we can address via robots, and make things a bit more agile.
In the Linux kernel, we usually get all these reports from robots afterwards, so I would say it's reasonable to follow the same approach.