ilm...@ilmari.org (Dagfinn Ilmari =?utf-8?Q?Manns=C3=A5ker?=) writes: > Noah Misch <n...@leadboat.com> writes: >> On Thu, Jul 16, 2020 at 11:41:56AM +0100, Dagfinn Ilmari Mannsåker wrote: >>> Instead of doing this on the master branch, would it be worth defining a >>> namespace for branches that the buildfarm tests in addition to master >>> and REL_*_STABLE?
>> Potentially. What advantages and disadvantages has Perl experienced? > The advantage is getting proposed changes tested on a number of > platforms that individual developers otherwise don't have access to. > For example http://perl.develop-help.com/?b=smoke-me%2Filmari%2Fremove-symbian > shows the reults of one branch of mine. > The only disadvantage is that it takes up more build farm capacity, but > it's not used for all changes, only ones that developers are concerned > might break on other platforms (e.g. affecting platform-specific code or > constructs otherwise known to behave differently across platforms and > compilers). I'd argue that cluttering the main development repo with dead branches is a non-negligible cost. We have one or two such left over from very ancient days, and I don't really want more. (Is there a way to remove a branch once it's been pushed to a shared git repo?) Another issue is that we're not going to open up the main repo for access by non-committers, so this approach doesn't help for most developers. We've had some success, I think, with Munro's cfbot solution --- I'd rather see that approach expanded to provide more test environments. regards, tom lane
