Tom Lane wrote:
The current buildfarm webpages make it easy to see when a branch tip is seriously broken, but it's not very easy to investigate transient failures, such as a regression test race condition that only materializes once in awhile. I would like to have a way of seeing just the failed build attempts across all machines running a given branch. Ideally it would be possible to tag failures as to the cause (if known) and/or symptom pattern, and then be able to examine just the ones without known cause or having similar symptoms.I'm not sure how much of this is reasonable to try to do with webpages similar to what we've got. But the data is all in a database AIUI, so another possibility is to do this work via SQL. That'd require having the ability to pull the information from the buildfarm database so someone else could manipulate it. So I guess the first question is can you make the build data available, and the second is whether you're interested in building more flexible views or just want to let someone else do that. Also, if anyone does make an effort to tag failures, it'd be good to somehow push that data back into the master database, so that we don't end up duplicating such work.
Well, the db is currently running around 13Gb, so that's not something to be exported lightly ;-)
If we upgraded from Postgres 8.0.x to 8.2.x we could make use of some features, like dynamic partitioning and copy from queries, that might make life easier (CP people: that's a hint :-) )
I don't want to fragment effort, but I also know CP don't want open access, for obvious reasons.
We can also look at a safe API that we could make available freely. I've already done this over SOAP (see example client at http://people.planetpostgresql.org/andrew/index.php?/archives/14-SOAP-server-for-Buildfarm-dashboard.html ). Doing updates is a whole other matter, of course.
Lastly, note that some buildfarm enhancements are on the SOC project list. I have no idea if anyone will express any interest in that, of course. It's not very glamorous work.
cheers andrew ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 6: explain analyze is your friend
