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

Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 20, 2007 at 02:57:13AM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>
>> Maybe we should think about filtering the noise. Like, say, discarding
>> every report from mongoose that involves an icc core dump ...
>> http://www.pgbuildfarm.org/cgi-bin/show_log.pl?nm=mongoose&dt=2007-03-20%2006:30:01
>>
>
> Maybe a simple compromise would be being able to setup a set of regexes
> that search the output and set a flag it that string is found. If you
> find the string, it gets marked with a flag, which means that when you
> look at mongoose, any failures that don't have the flag become easier
> to spot.
>
> It also means that once you've found a common failure, you can create
> the regex and then any other failures with the same string get tagged
> also, making unexplained ones easier to spot.
>
>
>

You need to show first that this is an adequate tagging mechanism, both
in tagging things adequately and in not picking up false positives,
which would make things worse, not better. And even then you need
someone to do the analysis to create the regex.

The buildfarm works because it leverages our strength, namely automating
things. But all the tagging suggestions I've seen will involve regular,
repetitive and possibly boring work, precisely the thing we are not good
at as a group.

If we had some staff they could be given this task (among others),
assuming we show that it actually works. We don't, so they can't.

cheers

andrew