[Development] Periodical digest from CI

[Sarajärvi Tony]

Hi everybody

A few pointers from the CI side.

* OpenSUSE 13.1 was brought back a while ago. We fixed the reboot issues with it. It had actually to do with Jenkins not noticing nodes going offline. The fix might have caused instability on the Windows side however. You might have noticed new random failures on Windows as you get a notification like this: "FATAL: channel is already closed". We suspect this might be due to the fix for openSUSE, but we don't know why.

* As openSUSE 13.1 has now been brought back, I removed openSUSE 12.3 from the CI. We will continue with 13.1 for a while, as it is an Evergreen version of openSUSE and has extended support.

* We have also added RHEL6 x64 to the CI quite recently. The autotests require some looking into, but else it seems to be working quite nicely. Also some GCC version matching on our dev branch is something I'm trying to have a look at.

* Also Mac 10.9 is in. And like expected with a new OS, autotests have new failures.

* Test XML logs are now being uploaded to testresults.qt-project.org. They will be copied to the same place where the console logs from Jenkins are located. We hope these will help you hunt down problems. We are also working on getting this more precise data to QtMetrics eventually. This again seems to cause instability on Jenkins. The artifact archiver in Jenkins has crashed at least twice since yesterday. Newer versions of Jenkins have already quite a few fixes for the archiver, and we're running tests to see if we can switch to a newer version. We picked the LTS version 1.532.3 of Jenkins for testing. Hopefully we'll switch to it soon.

* Don't recall if I've already mentioned this, but the QtMetrics page ( http://testresults.qt-project.org/qtmetrics ) is a lot faster now. We did a simple cache for the latest data and it now opens pretty much immediately. I hope you get more out of it now as the user experience should be a lot better.

* I hope I still have a few of you with me this far ;) Hot topic: autotests. As you already read above, we have failing autotests on a variety of platforms. We need ideas on how to get them fixed and most of all we need them fixed! The most urgent or most failing ones are listed manually here once a week: http://testresults.qt-project.org/qtmetrics/autoteststatus/index.html . 

* Related to fixing autotests is also the matter of running autotests on embedded devices. Currently a lot of autotests rely on a desktop machine and / or a window server. Current autotests should be flagged in a matter, so that they aren't built or run on an embedded platform that hasn't the prerequisites for the test to be successful. Ideas around this and instructions on how to solve these failing tests are expected to this dev-list :)

* We have once a week a meeting in Freenode on #qt-qa @ 14:00 EE(S)T regarding the CI. Feel free to participate and don't be afraid to ask questions or come with new suggestions. It's been rather quiet there recently, and we should pick it up. You may also ping me outside the meeting. I'm hanging around with the nick 'tosaraja'.

* Do you want to see someone from the CI team at the Contributor's summit in Berlin in June? Currently our participation is a bit open, but if you send us a request to be there, you might turn the scale towards us actually showing our faces there :)

Wishing you a good summer,
-Tony


Tony Sarajärvi
CI Tech Lead
Digia, Qt

Digia Plc
Elektroniikkatie 10 
FI-90590 Oulu 

Email: tony.sarajarvi at digia.com 
http://qt.digia.com 
Qt Blog: http://blog.qt.digia.com/
Qt Facebook: www.facebook.com/qtcommercial 
Qt Twitter: www.twitter.com/qtcommercial 

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