[Dev] Rotating build sheriff duties?

[Philippe Bossut]

+1
- Philippe

Heikki Toivonen wrote:

>Currently bear and I share the burden of watching Tinderbox and
>everything related to keep it going. It's not hard, but it consumes some
>time and is prone to interrupting your routine, making it hard to
>concentrate on stuff like, well, like programming :)
>
>At Netscape we had the build sheriff be a rotating duty. One person
>would be designated the sheriff of the day, and it worked well. So I
>would like to propose it for us as well. I think it would mean you'd
>have build sheriff duties maybe one day a month, which shouldn't be too
>big a burden on anyone.
>
>Here's what the sheriff would be required to do:
>
>* Make sure all Tinderboxes are running and reporting results. This
>involves checkin that the tree is green, that all the columns that are
>supposed to be there are there, and that there are recent results in all
>columns.
>* Make sure people are following checkin policies. I.e., right now only
>blockers and docs get checked in on the branch, all checkins have sane
>comments etc. In case of errors, be ready to ask committer to back out
>or do it yourself, or in some cases send clarifications to dev etc.
>* If there is orange, investigate what caused it and make sure it gets
>followed up. If it seems it was caused by a recent checkin, make sure
>the person who checked in the suspect time period are on it. If it is
>intermittent, make sure there is a bug filed on it.
>* If the tree goes red, check if it was caused by a checkin. If it was,
>make sure that the suspect people are on it. If it doesn't seem to get
>fixed in a day, get it backed out.
>* Add messages to all issues on the Tinderbox notice board (the little
>stars).
>* Monitor performance results, and make sure regressions get followed up
>(file bug, etc.)
>* In case there are issues that would require restarting Tinderbox
>clients, kill hung tests etc. contact bear to let him know about the
>problem so that bear can fix it. The sheriff is not expected to do this
>himself/herself.
>
>The benefit of this would of course be that we would spread the load of
>maintaining and working with Tinderbox, and also make all the people who
>participate in the sheriff program to become more knowledgeable about
>Tinderbox and how you can diagnose problems with it.
>
>Thoughts? Anyone absolutely opposed to participating? If so, why? Other
>ideas?
>
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