[Xorp-users] Call for feedback/volunteers: Build system, platform tier support.

[Ben Greear]

On 07/14/2009 09:16 AM, Bruce Simpson wrote:
> Ben,
>
> Thanks for this. So, are you willing to be platform lead for Fedora? ;-)

I'm willing to help, and I'll keep (my) xorp compiling on whatever platforms we're
using, but I don't necessarily have time to try to get xorp into official
rpms or things like that.

> If I had to pin down one Fedora release for XORP community support,
> which one would you recommend?

The latest (FC 11, currently).  If you can get something building rpms
for that, it's very likely someone else (perhaps me) can easily get it working on
older systems for those who care.  I can't necessarily test all releases,
but I have lots of different build machines (FC2, FC5, FC8, FC8-64, F11-64,
Ubuntu 9.04, etc).

Please also understand:  I am running fairly heavily patched xorp, and
that will be my personal focus.  I'll try to get as much of these patches accepted
upstream as possible when the public tree opens again, but I'm not sure
how much of that will actually be accepted.

> The Boost project ship a run.py script which automatically gathers
> everything, and submits an XML report upstream:
> http://www.boost.org/development/running_regression_tests.html
> http://www.boost.org/development/tests/release/developer/summary.html
> [FreeBSD ref8 is having problems...hmm]
>
> It might be good to integrate something like this into the tree, if
> diverse platform support means the wearing of hats by individuals
> outside of XORP, Inc.

I doubt I'd have time to do any significant work on something like this.

I think it would be better to see what kind of user reports come in
and then concentrate on fixing whatever bugs people find.

> I believe it's realistic that XORP, Inc. may still be able to dedicate
> some resources to testing on the community branch, although this is more
> likely to be for their desktop systems, and the embedded targets for the
> commercial product.

I'm very interested to know how Xorp plans to handle the public tree
v/s whatever else they have going.  I see hints that outside developers
will be given some sort of commit privileges, but it's my opinion that
some Xorp person should be the gatekeeper (much as Linus is for Linux).

Otherwise, there may be no one to keep me from dumping all of my
virtualization patches upstream, which would obviously be great for me,
but perhaps of questionable use for others ;)


> Participating in a BuildBot cluster does mean trusting outsiders with
> your computing resources, having infrastructure, etc.
> Not ruling out the continued use of BuildBot -- but the Boost community
> clearly identified that it isn't always possible to sustain
> cross-platform regression coverage in a community project, so they came
> up with a good solution -- self-service regression tests...

If Xorp (.com) has resources to support this, it sounds good, but if not,
then I think something minimal will be much better than something complex
that is not actually maintained.  In my experience, nothing rots faster than
automated regression tests and builds.

Thanks,
Ben


-- 
Ben Greear <greearb at candelatech.com>
Candela Technologies Inc  http://www.candelatech.com