Keeping track of buildfarm animals' personality

Way back in 2004 there was discussion of how we wanted to differentiate
buildfarm animals. We were flying blind to a large extent, as we didn't
have many similar things to compare to. We settled on {OS-name,
OS-version, Compiler-name, Compiler-version}. The idea was that the
names would be invariant but we would allow for OS and compiler upgrades.

There are two problems with this system, and have been since the get-go.
First, owners forget to run the upgrade-personalty.pl script when the
upgrade the OS and./or compiler. Second, there is no standardization of
the names. Complaints about these surfaced (again) at the Vancouver
unconference session about the buildfarm's future.

It was suggested that we should have the buildfarm client collect
information and report it in a piece of JSON which the server would then
use to update the personality table automatically. However, there are
some issues.

First there are issues of the source of information. And second there is
what information to extract from the source.

Let's take the simple case. On Linux this is fairly straightforward in
most cases. We can extract the "ID" and "VERSION_ID" attributes from
/etc/os-release, and we can get the compiler version with  gcc--version
or clang --version, and get the version number out of the first line. I
think I'd strip out the vendor string, so it would just be something
like "13.2.1".

On windows, systeminfo gives you this sort of information:

OS Name: Microsoft Windows Server 2019 Datacenter

I guess by analogy with Linux we'd say that the OS Name is "Windows
Server" and the version just "2019".

cl /? shows you a version line we could similarly parse to get something
like 19.40.33808. We might want a way to tie that back to a particular
version of VS, but it would do for now.

For msys2 and cygwin we can get the version by calling "cygcheck
--version". These two are complicated by the fact that they are virtual
environments.

I don't have information about other OSs or compilers.

For now I'm intending just to collect the information and see what gaps
we have, before I start automating personality update.

If you have information about an OS or Compiler that's used in the
buildfarm that I haven't listed, please let me know.

cheers

andrew

--
Andrew Dunstan
EDB: https://www.enterprisedb.com