Re: Build failure tooling improvements

[Rob Whitlock <rwhitlock22%gmail.com@localhost>]

> On Mar 20, 2025, at 1:29 PM, Jonathan Perkin <jperkin%pkgsrc.org@localhost> wrote:
> 
> It's been encouraging to see some of the proposals recently to improve quality.  Something I've obviously been very passionate about for a long time.
> 
> In the past I've done a lot of work, whether that's daily bulk builds across multiple operating systems, the CI system, scan failure mails, custom bulk builds, lots of additional checks, etc, but they haven't always been well received or used as I'd hoped, which has obviously led to some frustration on both sides.
> 
> So, how about a different approach.  What would you like me to work on?  What features would you like to see, and would actively use?  What is your ideal workflow?  What would it take for your workflow to include cross-platform checks prior to commit?  What resources do you need to help ensure each individual commit is as high-quality as possible?
> 
> I want to build systems and tooling that will help improve pkgsrc quality, but they have to actually be used, with a reasonable expectation that failures will be acted upon.  If we can agree on it, I'll build it.
> 
> I'm in the very fortunate position where I'm employed to work pretty much full-time on pkgsrc, and I'd much rather that time was spent on tooling that will be used by everyone and improves pkgsrc for all.
> 
> It's likely that there will be too many differing opinions to come up with a golden path that suits everyone for every commit, but I wonder if we might get to the point where we at least have a pmc-enforced path for the more critical parts of the tree.

I occasionally run into the issue that a program builds but crashes on startup. A suggestion would be to have some sort of smoke test that runs the program and checks for that sort of thing. That would probably be package-specific though, and would likely have overlap with any test target that might already be present.

> Thanks,
> 
> -- 
> Jonathan Perkin                    pkgsrc.smartos.org
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