Re: Buildfarm feature request: some way to track/classify failures

BTW, before I forget, this little project turned up a couple of
small improvements for the current buildfarm infrastructure:

1. There are half a dozen entries with obviously bogus timestamps:

bfarm=# select sysname,snapshot,branch from mfailures where snapshot < '2004-01-01';
sysname | snapshot | branch
------------+---------------------+--------
corgi | 1997-10-14 14:20:10 | HEAD
kookaburra | 1970-01-01 01:23:00 | HEAD
corgi | 1997-09-30 11:47:08 | HEAD
corgi | 1997-10-17 14:20:11 | HEAD
corgi | 1997-12-21 15:20:11 | HEAD
corgi | 1997-10-15 14:20:10 | HEAD
corgi | 1997-09-28 11:47:09 | HEAD
corgi | 1997-09-28 11:47:08 | HEAD
(8 rows)

indicating wrong system clock settings on these buildfarm machines.
(Indeed, IIRC these failures were actually caused by the ridiculous
clock settings --- we have at least one regression test that checks
century >= 21 ...) Perhaps the buildfarm server should bounce
reports with timestamps more than a day in the past or a few minutes in
the future. I think though that a more useful answer would be to
include "time of receipt of report" in the permanent record, and then
subsequent analysis could make its own decisions about whether to
believe the snapshot timestamp --- plus we could track elapsed times for
builds, which could be interesting in itself.

2. I was annoyed repeatedly that some buildfarm members weren't
reporting log_archive_filenames entries, which forced going the long
way round in the process I was using. Seems like we need some more
proactive means for getting buildfarm owners to keep their script
versions up-to-date. Not sure what that should look like exactly,
as long as it's not "you can run an ancient version as long as you
please".

regards, tom lane