[Development] Qt CI reliability

[Jędrzej Nowacki]

On Tuesday 03 of May 2016 14:54:50 Sean Harmer wrote:
> On Monday 02 May 2016 11:14:24 Jędrzej Nowacki wrote:
> > On Saturday 30 of April 2016 20:26:20 Sean Harmer wrote:
> (...)
> What would be a *very* useful feature would be if we can trigger a test
> build of a change on a particular configuration for such cases where we
> don't have ready access to a configuration locally.
We have this feature, but it is not exposed. Qt account integration is missing 
as well as some kind of limitation to protect CI resources. If you have a 
really urgent thing to test ping me on IRC. I can run a test run for you.

> > I will ask IT about network, it seems that network interface was
> > re-configured during CI run and DHCP assigned a different IP. It should
> > not
> > happen (TM)
> 
> Yes that sort of thing should be done in a specified window out of hours
> after disabling the CI master to be able to disseminate jobs to the nodes.
Well it was not about maintenance. A node tried to re-new it's IP lease and it 
got a new IP instead of an old one. It may be some kind of DHCP miss-
configuration or operating system failed to ask in time to re-new the IP lease. 
I do not know, how on earth this could happen. I need to access logs.

> > Rule of thumb is: if logs show broken compilation it means: real problem,
> > don't blame CI. There are three main reasons, that I'm aware of, that can
> > cause the problem (sorted according to the probability):
> > 1. One of changes being integrated broke the compilation
> 
> Fine and expected and, with timely failures, not an issue.
> 
> > 2. One of module dependencies broke source compatibility
> 
> This is very rarely an issue, at least for Qt 3D.
> 
> > 3. There was a untested template update (this reason will almost disappear
> > soon)
> 
> Do you mean VM template? If so then yes that's again something that should
> ideally be verified before deployment.
Eh, wrong phrasing. Templates are tested. The problem is that the current 
process is a bit racy. Updating template is a work that require time, 
especially for testing and deployment. Regressions may appear during that time 
window. Anyway the process is about to be changed soon. 

Cheers,
 Jędrek