[oe] tinderbox, bug reports and a freshly-broken mplayer

[John Willis]

Robert,

>   in order to keep the peace, i'm more than willing to file actual OE
> bug reports for breakage i discover when building.  specifically, i'm
> almost always trying to build beagleboard-demo-image on my up-to-date
> fedora system, which seems to be a relatively unpopular working system
> for most people here (except for philip b.), so i'm getting used to
> running into breakage that no one else is seeing -- it's just a fact
> of life.
> 
>   ignoring gnome-games for now, after a recent "git pull" on the OE
> dev branch, the "mplayer" package now no longer builds.  from the git
> log, i can see:

<snip>

On the gnome-games front, I have been messing with gnome-games packages for
something else (unrelated to the BB-demo image). I can mail you a few BB's
to try if you want but none of it is working 100% yet (newer versions of
gnome-games introduce requirements for OpenGL/Clutter etc. and that opens a
whole world of pain).

>   if i "git reset" to the commit just before that, it builds fine;
> ergo, that seems to be the commit that broke it.  a wild guess is that
> the "maxrev" parameters are the cause, given that at least one now
> falls below the requested svn revision, causing an essential patch to
> no longer be applied, but that's just a guess until i look more
> closely.

<snip>

If you have a hunch on the patch then give it a go, or drop down the SRCREV
for a few days until someone else can get around to fixing the issue, I
suspect this bug will be seen widely (in fact I reproduced it on my setup
with a fresh pull of mplayer_svn.bb on a Ubuntu build host yesterday). Your
hunch seems good but I have no time to personally look at this now.

>   so ... i can file this over at http://bugs.openembedded.net/ if
> that's the way to go.  but others were talking about this tinderbox
> thing, which i've never used.  a quick glance suggests it's a more
> formal, automated way of doing regular builds.  would that be
> appropriate for me, if it's understood i'm always building on the same
> distro?  feel free to point me at a quick intro, or i'll just file a
> regular bug if that's the way to go.

Let's be honest, you're never going to go too far wrong raising a bug report
;).

As for TinderBox, I did include some links in an earlier mail 

"I think Phil (or someone else) suggest you consider contributing your build
logs to OESTATS/TinderBox
(http://wiki.openembedded.net/index.php/How_do_I_send_automatic_success_and_
failure_reports) at least with that setup you leave a reference the failing
logs in bug reports/mails so people can have a look into all the gory
details :)." 

It only takes a few minor changes to your local.conf and all your build logs
and build status are automatically uploaded to the server. This makes
diagnosing build issues/collective debugging etc. that little bit easier as
anyone can go to http://tinderbox.openembedded.org/builders/<your_nick> and
see what your builds and failures and dig into the logs. If you worried
about personal info. being uploaded then check into oestats-client.bbclass
to see what is happening under the hood.

To prove a point this is a link to the failed mplayer build I did yesterday
(http://tinderbox.openembedded.org/packages/431300/).

Regards,

John