Buildbot

[John W. Eaton]

I've installed an instance of buildbot here:

  http://buildbot.octave.org:8010

I also added a section about it on the wiki:

  http://wiki.octave.org/Continuous_Build

The only build slave is currently a system I maintain that is running 
Debian testing.  As the wiki page shows, I'm building the following 
configurations (all from the hg default branch):

  GCC 4.9
  GCC 5
  GCC 6
  default system GCC with no optional dependencies
  Clang 3.7
  Clang 3.8
  Clang 3.9
  mxe-octave for Windows 32
  mxe-octave for Windows 64
  mxe-octave for Windows 64 with 64-bit indexing

I can easily add builds of the stable branch, but will probably wait 
until after 4.2 is released since the stable branch is currently frozen.

I would like to expand the set of systems to cover other Operating 
systems and configurations but will need help with this.  Important 
systems include

  Mac OS X
  Debian stable
  Unbuntu
  RHEL
  Fedora
  ?

If you are interested in running a buildbot slave for one of these 
systems, please reply to this message on the mailing list or contact me. 
 I would also be happy to offload some of the CPU cycles required for 
building the various configurations that I'm currently handling.

Other open projects:

  * Set up a slave running on a Windows system that can fetch copies of 
Octave built with mxe-octave, install them, and run the test suite.

  * Properly filter the test results.  Currently the test step succeeds 
if it exits with zero status.  There is no check on the number of test 
failures.

My hope is that doing continuous builds on many different operating 
systems and configurations will help speed development by alerting us to 
build or test failures almost as soon as they are introduced.  As it is 
now, most developers are working on Linux systems and we often don't see 
failures on other types of systems for some time.  Once a problem is 
noticed it can be difficult and time consuming to determine just what 
change caused the trouble.

jwe