some news about buildfarm

[tridge at samba.org]

Hi Matthieu,

 > We are quite close to this point and already I'd like that for hosts 
 > that now builds who ever broke the build (or the install) provide a fix 
 > in a timely manner. Is there any objection ?

I think fixing cross-platform build breakages is important, but it
doesn't override everything else. So I think it would be worth trying
to keep as many of our build farm hosts building as we can, but I also
think it is likely that there will be periods of time when things
break again in the future. As you know, finding and fixing build
breakages on some hosts is very hard.

One thing I'd like to see is us installing a few VMs of non-Linux
systems on sn.samba.org, then adding autobuild rules that test the
build on those systems. For example, we could install FreeBSD and
OpenSolaris as VMs. 

Doing that would gain us a few things:

 - it would catch build errors on those systems at the time the
   developer is pushing the change, rather than later. We know from
   experience that asking developers to fix things once they are
   already in master is unreliable.

 - it would give all committers direct shell access to these systems,
   with all the necessary developer tools installed.

The downside is that VMs are not 100% reliable, so we'd probably need
to skip the build tests on those systems if they don't first pass a
basic "build hello world" test. 

Cheers, Tridge