Announcing the IcedTea buildbot

[Mark Wielaard]

Hi hackers,

Over the last few weeks Xerxes and I have been experimenting with a
buildbot setup which you can see at:
http://builder.classpath.org/icedtea/buildbot/waterfall

The idea is that everybody who cares can add a buildslave setup to do a
build and check for the configuration and architecture they care about.

Currently all buildslaves are based on Debian derivatives and cover
ia32, x86_64 and some arm architectures are. It does build various
alternative runtime setups (cacao, shark, zero). And the slaves build
various variants of icedtea6, icedtea7, icedtea-web (and the testrepo).

If you have a spare machine with a dedicated internet connection that
could do builds of some configuration you care about please let us know
and we will try to add it as slave. If you have an alternative
configuration you want to see done by one of the existing build slaves
please also let us know and we can see if there are enough cycles to add
it.

The current buildbot master.cfg setup is checked in at
http://icedtea.classpath.org/hg/buildbot
I admit the master.cfg is a bit hacky. It needs to be cleaned up so that
we have nice functions/factories for generating the build steps based on
whether the slave wants to do a quick/full, special config flags,
parallel, with/without some checks, etc. build instead of the current
copy/paste hell that is there. But although I am a little ashamed of how
bad my python skills are, it seemed better to just admit it needs
cleanup and ask for help from those more proficient in python :)

Also checked in is the old hacky bash shell script that is still running
on builder.classpath.org and that sends emails as soon as the build of
icedtea6 or icedtea7 trunk fails and/or the test results change. It
would be nice to transfer any missing functionality to the new buildbot
setup (like the test results comparison), so that any build slave that
wishes can do the same. Since this script also still produces binaries
everybody can use and full jtreg test result files, see under
http://builder.classpath.org/icedtea/. I decided to keep this also still
running. But would really, really like to get rid of in the future.

Feedback on how we can make this buildbot setup more productive for
anybody hacking on icedtea really appreciated.

Thanks,

Mark