Re: [PATCH] travis-ci: build Git during the 'script' phase

["SZEDER Gábor" <szeder.dev@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Jan 8, 2018 at 11:38 PM, Lars Schneider
<larsxschneider@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 08 Jan 2018, at 23:07, Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> wrote:
>>
>> SZEDER Gábor <szeder.dev@gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> The reason why Travis CI does it this way and why it's a better
>>> approach than ours lies in how unsuccessful build jobs are
>>> categorized.  ...
>>> ...
>>> This makes it easier, both for humans looking at the Travis CI web
>>> interface and for automated tools querying the Travis CI API,...
>>> ...
>>> A verbose commit message for such a change... but I don't know why we
>>> started with building Git in the 'before_script' phase.
>>
>> Thanks for writing it up clearly.  TBH, I didn't even realize that
>> there were meaningful distinctions between the two cases after
>> seeing that sometimes our tests were failing and sometimes erroring
>> ;-)
>
> I understand the reasons for the proposed patch. However, I did this
> intentionally back then. Here is my reason:
>
> If `make` is successful, then I am not interested in its output.

If 'prove' is successful, then I'm not interested in its output ;)

> Look at this run: https://travis-ci.org/szeder/git/jobs/324271623
>
> You have to scroll down 1,406 lines to get to the test result
> output (this is usually the interesting part).

That's the just beginning of a looong list of executed test scripts in
seemingly pseudo-random order.  IMHO that's very rarely the interesting
part; I, for one, am only interested in that list in exceptional cases,
e.g. while tweaking the build dependencies or the 'prove --state=...'
options.

These are the really interesting parts of the build job's output, the
parts that do matter most of the time:

  # compiler error
  https://travis-ci.org/git/git/jobs/325252417#L1766
  # which tests failed
  https://travis-ci.org/git/git/jobs/315658238#L2247
  # stray build artifacts
  https://travis-ci.org/szeder/git/jobs/323531220#L2236
  # (no example logs for erroring while installing dependencies, OSX
  # timeout, etc.)

Note that these are all at the very end of the trace log, i.e. they are
easily accessible by one or two keystrokes (depending on whether the
keyboard has a dedicated 'End' key or requires an Fn combo), a vigorous
drag of the scrollbar, or a click on the "Scroll to end of log" circle
in the top right corner.

> If this is a valid argument for you,

I'm unconvinced :)

> would it be an option to
> pipe the verbose `make` output to a file and only print it in case
> of error (we do something similar for the tests already).

It's risky, because the build process would be completely silent for the
duration of building Git.  Travis CI considers a build 'errored' if it
doesn't produce any output for 10 minutes.  While building Git usually
takes much less time, transient slowdowns apparently do occur.

Gábor