Re: Bison 3.0 updates

On 2013-07-29 10:46:41 -0400, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>
> On 07/29/2013 10:28 AM, Marti Raudsepp wrote:
> >Hi,
> >
> >>On 07/29/2013 01:05 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
> >>>Buildfarm member anchovy has been failing for the last couple of days,
> >>>evidently because its owner just couldn't wait to adopt bison 3.0,
> >>>which is all of 3 days old.
> >Hmm? Anchovy is upgrading automatically to newest Arch Linux packages daily.
> >
> >I assumed that's a good thing -- the purpose of build farm is to test
> >PostgreSQL in various different real-life environments? Arch Linux is
> >one such environment that adopts new packages very quickly. If Arch
> >users are unable to build PostgreSQL then surely it's good to be
> >notified by the build farm before real users start reporting problems?
> >
> >I don't mean to sound reluctant, I'm open to suggestions, but please
> >help me understand why this is bad.
>
>
> The buildfarm is principally designed to detect when some change in the
> Postgres code breaks something. As such, the expectation is that the animals
> will provide a fairly stable platform. A totally moving target will present
> us with false positives, since the failure could be due to no action of ours
> at all.
>
> A machine that can auto-upgrade anything at any time is really not very fit
> for the purpose. What that would be testing is not if a change in Postgres
> code has broken something, but if the host packaging system has broken
> something.

FWIW given the evidence here anchovy seems to do a good job. Both the
gcc 4.8 and the bison 3.0 problems are things the project needs to know
about and that need to get fixed. And none of the other animals seems to
run anything really up2date.
Also, afaik Arch has a rolling release model, so there isn't any other
specific release that should be tested instead.

Greetings,

Andres Freund

--
Andres Freund http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services