Purple is a fruit (…and also a colour on Tinderbox!)

September 2nd, 2010

Today I successful landed the first part of bug 505512, which lays the ground work for catching all sorts of build problems and turning them purple, instead of red. As part of this initial work we’ll now be catching most problems when cloning Mercurial repositories, turning the builds purple, and automatically retrying them.

In the next week or two I’m going to add similar behaviour for at least the following:

  • Graph Server post failures
  • Slave disconnections
  • Sendchange failures
  • out of disk issues
  • CVS checkout failures (yes, we still use CVS….)

If there’s other things people can think of that should be flagged as infra problems, or that should cause builds to be retried, please add them to this Etherpad: http://etherpad.mozilla.com:9000/build-infra-errors. Bonus points if you write the regular expression that catches it :-).

Currently, the purpleness is only visible on plain Tinderbox, but once bug 592340 is resolved, TBPL will support it as well.

Posted by bhearsum Filed in planet
4 Comments »

4 Responses to “Purple is a fruit (…and also a colour on Tinderbox!)”

  1. njn Says:
    September 2nd, 2010 at 9:09 pm

    Cool!

  2. Tony Mechelynck Says:
    September 3rd, 2010 at 4:03 am

    That L? text is almost invisible against the dark purple background. Adding the following to userContent.css makes it much more readable:

    @-moz-document domain(tinderbox.mozilla.org){ td[bgcolor="770088"] { background-color: #F4F !important } }

  3. John Hopkins Says:
    September 3rd, 2010 at 11:23 am

    Perhaps a new Buildbot::Exception::Transient type of class would be useful for throwing retry-able exceptions within the buildbot codebase. Those could be flagged as the purple build status you’re talking about.

  4. bhearsum Says:
    September 3rd, 2010 at 11:27 am

    @John

    Buildbot already has such a distinction, actually. There’s both an EXCEPTION and RETRY status. Buildbot itself treats RETRY more like incomplete than an exception. We use the TinderboxMailNotifier to report status, and *it* treats RETRY like EXCEPTION because we need to report some status or else the build will look it never finished.

    For our purposes, purple works well for both of those status’, I think.

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