RFR: 8259679: GitHub actions should use MSVC 14.28

[Magnus Ihse Bursie]

On 2021-01-20 06:48, David Holmes wrote:
> On 19/01/2021 11:48 pm, Magnus Ihse Bursie wrote:
>>
>> On 2021-01-19 00:13, David Holmes wrote:
>>> Hard-wiring build numbers seems a maintenance PITA. :( Is there not 
>>> a way to do this that is independent of the actual build installed?
>> I agree that hard-wiring numbers in the code is bad. However, having 
>> explicit version numbers for our dependencies is good. That is the 
>> philosophy behind jib, and it has served us well. We should look at 
>> finding a way to store the actual versioon numbers outside the 
>> submit.yml file, though.
>
> I think this is a bit different to the way we use jib to manage our 
> own build environment.
>
>> But what do you mean by "independent of the actual build installed"?
>
> We have AFAIK no control over what toolkit versions are installed for 
> Github actions, so they could change at any time. We update today to 
> request 14.28 and tomorrow they replace 14.28 with 14.29 and our 
> builds fail again even though they would likely be perfectly fine on 
> 14.29. To me if we just were able to say "Use latest VS 14.x" then 
> that would suffice most of the time. Occasionally we could hit an 
> issue where our sources are not yet compatible with the latest VS but 
> hopefully that is less frequent than the frequency these VS builds 
> change.

I think that depends on how we view the GHA testing, which still is not 
clear. Or rather, each OpenJDK developer seem to have their own opinion 
on this, and no official guidelines to help us.

I think we need to make the most effort we can to control the GHA 
environment. That means requesting a specific version of VS, and having 
a fail-fast if that is not available. That way, we get to know when GHA 
environment changes.

Which is how things work today.

>
>>> Would it not also be good to add a check for the existence of the 
>>> build that we do hard-wire? That way the problem will be very clear 
>>> next time.
>> It would be fantastic! Please tell me how to to that in the limited, 
>> brain-dead Github Actions environment. :-(
>
> If we put those hard-wired version/build numbers into a file readable 
> by configure, then couldn't configure check it?

So just to be clear: configure *did* check for the existence of VS, and 
it did not find it, and thus it aborted and complained. So we did have 
this fail-fast functionality. But since the GHA environment contained a 
half-broken, half-working installation of the VS version in question, 
the error message from configure was not really clear.

This PR was about updating the version of VS required by the GHA build 
script. Unfortunately, I think it's not possible to either:

1) move the version number to a separate configuration file, instead of 
hard-coding it in the yaml source

2) have the submit.yml GHA script check for the availability of the 
specific version of VS before launching configure.

but it might be just my limited knowledge about the system. If it were 
possible, I think we should do both.

/Magnus

>
> Cheers,
> David
>
>> /Magnus
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> David
>>>
>>>> -------------
>>>>
>>>> Commit messages:
>>>>   - 8259679: GitHub actions should use MSVC 14.28
>>>>
>>>> Changes: https://git.openjdk.java.net/jdk/pull/2126/files
>>>>   Webrev: https://webrevs.openjdk.java.net/?repo=jdk&pr=2126&range=00
>>>>    Issue: https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8259679
>>>>    Stats: 2 lines in 1 file changed: 0 ins; 0 del; 2 mod
>>>>    Patch: https://git.openjdk.java.net/jdk/pull/2126.diff
>>>>    Fetch: git fetch https://git.openjdk.java.net/jdk 
>>>> pull/2126/head:pull/2126
>>>>
>>>> PR: https://git.openjdk.java.net/jdk/pull/2126
>>>>
>>