Re: Build farm

Andrew Dunstan wrote:

>
>
> Jean-Michel POURE wrote:
>
>> Le Vendredi 21 Novembre 2003 19:47, Tom Lane a écrit :
>>  
>>
>>> I think the main value of a build farm is that we'd get nearly 
>>> immediate
>>> feedback about the majority of simple porting problems.  Your previous
>>> arguments that it wouldn't smoke everything out are certainly valid ---
>>> but we wouldn't abandon the regression tests just because they don't
>>> find everything.  Immediate feedback is good because a patch can be
>>> fixed while it's still fresh in the author's mind.
>>>   
>>
>>
>> Dear friends,
>>
>> We have a small build farm for pgAdmin covering Win32, FreeBSD and 
>> most GNU/
>> Linux systems. See 
>> http://www.pgadmin.org/pgadmin3/download.php#snapshots
>>
>> The advantage are immediate feedback and correction of problems. 
>> Also, in a release cycle, developers and translators are quite 
>> motivated to see their work published fast.
>> Of course, it is always hard to "mesure" the real impact of a build 
>> farm. My opinion it that it is quite positive, as it helps tighten 
>> the links between people, which is free software is mostly about.
>>
>>  
>>
>
> Right. But I think we have been talking about using the build farm to 
> do test builds rather than to provide snapshots. I'd be very wary of 
> providing arbitrary snapshots of postgres, whereas I'd be prepared to 
> try a snapshot of pgadmin3 under certain circumstances. (Also, 
> building your own snapshot of postgres is somewhat easier than 
> building your own snapshot of pgadmin3).

Testing a build and creating a snapshot compilation is quite the same, 
just a different name and announcement. I agree that using a pgadmin 
snapshot is different from pgsql, somebody using a bleeding edge pgsql 
version should be prepared to compile it on his own machine.

And a tiny correction: The farm member for win32 is my machine, and it's 
operated manually :-)

Regards,
Andreas