Nightly builds?

[Christopher Lightfoot]

Hi,

On top of that is there anywhere/one within the community that has
some sort of hardware test centre - how does hardware testing take
place? Is it something only done by developers if they have the
hardware or only done by clients using log dumps?

One of the most common complaints I hear when reporting problems is
the developer doesn't have the hardware to test that particular
chipset or graphics card or cpu etc - how difficult would it be to set
up a central hub of hardware that is used solely for testing open
source projects? I realise everyone always argues about sharing these
things but surely that's a better position to be in than not having
the hardware to test against at all.

Basically people should either by able to donate money or hardware and
receive some sort of badge or something to make them feel good and
somebody just sets up combinations of machines that just then sit
there and test code; every night the latest build is downloaded and
ran against some fixed test on all the variations of graphics cards or
whatever and the results are returned.

The other approach is some form of distributed testing that users can
opt-in to do that doesn't break their current system but does an
accurate test on their hardware; I know screen savers are old hat but
is there any way you could put together something that when their
machine is idle gets the latest build and runs some tests against
their card or hardware and reports back.

Chris


On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 1:27 AM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've noticed a few old video chipsets are dropping off the edge of Xorg.
>
> This is entirely understandable - Xorg has too few developers
> desperately trying to drag the 1990s code base into the twenty-first
> century and there are very few testers for the ancient chips. So many
> of them have broken, and no-one much notices until the distros release
> that version of X. No-one wants this to happen, but it does.
>
> e.g. Ubuntu 9.10 is fantastic on current chips. (Typing this on my new
> work Portege R600. Wobbly windows a go go!) But old stuff is showing
> breakage, and it's unlikely to be fixed.
>
> The one thing that occurs to me is: make testing of git head much
> easier. Much, much easier.
>
> 1. Nightly builds. Did wonders for Mozilla. Binary of main supported
> architectures (linux/i386, opensolaris, whatever someone will be able
> to commit to build nightly). Download and run. Report bugs.
> 2. Make the source build easier, so people will build and run it from
> source for the more obscure platforms.
>
> 1. requires build server, web server and bandwidth resources. 2.
> requires polishing and debugging and making it very easy for people to
> just keep up with X with a git pull.
>
> Ideas? Is this pointing toward something useful?
>
> (I'm not a coder myself or I'd be bashing on 2., but I do like
> reviving crusty old machinery.)
>
>
> - d.
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