[Buildroot] Call for autobuild fixing for 2014.02

Thomas De Schampheleire patrickdepinguin at gmail.com
Fri Feb 7 08:02:45 UTC 2014


All,

At the end of this month, buildroot-2014.02 will be released. In accordance
with our standard 3-month release cycle, this last month is all about
stabilization: bug fixing, autobuild fixing, etc.

Last release cycle (2013.11) several developers put an increased effort in the
last month for this stabilization, and it has definitely made a great impact.
The number of autobuild failures significantly decreased during this time. This
release, we can even do better!
Looking at the current statistics, we are having 50-60% succeeding autobuilds,
which we should certainly increase towards 70-80%!

Therefore, I would like to request all developers to temporarily stop creating
new features, adding new packages, etc. during the rest of this month, and
focus entirely on fixing autobuild problems (or other problems) instead.

There are several ways in which you can help: - Send brief analysis mails based
on the autobuild results (sent daily by Thomas Petazzoni). This analysis mails
typically contain for each reported failure: a copy/paste of the relevant part
of the build log, and optionally a suggested resolution. These mails help other
developers in selecting a problem they will fix, and avoids duplicate effort.

- Fixing actual autobuild problems. To fix a problem, you would start by
downloading the defconfig from the autobuild site, apply it in a fresh
repository, probably set a good value for BR2_DL_DIR, and run 'make' to see if
you can reproduce the problem. Once you can reproduce it, you can analyze in
more detail and create a fix.  Depending on the problem, you can attempt some
shortcuts. For example instead of building everything, you can request to build
one particular package (foo) by running 'make toolchain foo'. If the problem is
caused only by the overall configuration and foo itself (not by a missing
dependency) this faster build would also show the problem. Remember: it's
crucial that you can first reproduce the problem (with or without shortcut).
Otherwise you may 'fix' something that is not broken.  If you want to fix a
particular problem but get stuck, don't hesitate in sending your findings to
the list. Other developers can try to help you.

- Testing fixes sent by other developers. This involves similar steps as fixing
the problem itself: first verify that you can reproduce the problem, then apply
the fix and verify that the problem is gone. If all this is successful, then
please respond on the fix with a Tested-by: tag.  This will help the maintainer
in knowing which patches to apply.

- Analyzing and if needed fixing bug reports. Open buildroot bugs are at:
https://bugs.busybox.net/buglist.cgi?bug_status=__open__&content=&product=buildroot&query_format=specific&order=bug_id%20DESC&query_based_on=


Thanks a lot,

Thomas


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