pcb-rnd knowledge pool

 

Autobuild

autobuild by Tibor 'Igor2' Palinkas on 2020-11-30

Tags: dev, autobuild, testfarm, testing, continous, integration

node source

 

 

Abstract: n/a

  From time to time we have bugs detected only after a release. If we did more testing before release, we could avoid that. One of the cases where we could improve a lot is the non-x86_64 and/or non-linux targets: most of our users are on x86_64, so that platform gets a lot of testing, but anything beyond that, even i386, suffers from lack of testing.

We have an auto-build system ("Continuous Integration", "Continuous Testing", if you like buzzwords), and it catches a lot of bugs very early. We could just run more of those (more operating systems, more architectures). Currently the bottleneck is that I simply do not have the resources to do so: computer power + electricity.

And that's where you could potentially help. At the moment we have an x86_64 compile-every-commit (CEC) host donated by a Hungarian hacker, plus I plan to set up an i386 CEC on repo.hu. We could extend that with more CEC and more ST (scheduled-time) and maybe even MS (manually-started) tests. If you participate, you provide some disk space, some RAM, some CPU time so that an automatic system can do test compilation.

Beyond the one-time setup, you generally don't need to do anything, just let it run, all triggers and tests are fully automatic.

About the tests performed: I plan to provide options for participants to select what kind of tests they want to spend their resources on: pcb-rnd only, any ringdove and related projects (e.g. dependencies), or any free software hosted on repo.hu.

Further reading: