Finally Excelsior is doing what it has been bought to do: tinderboxing. Well, not really to full capacity but I’ve got enough pieces of the puzzle in place that it should soon start building regularly.
What the tinderbox set up is doing now is actually a limited run: it’s building the reverse dependencies of virtual/ffmpeg to find out which packages actually require libpostproc, so that we can fix their dependencies with libav — to follow up on Tomáš’s post I’m also strongly attached to libav, being, together with Luca, part of the development team of the project.
Speaking about libav, one of the things that since a couple of days ago Excelsior is doing, is running FATE so to both cover AMD Bulldozer’s architecture and Gentoo Hardened. For those who do not know, FATE is an automated testing environment that configures, builds, and run the tests for libav and then send the result to a central server for analysis. The whole build takes three minutes on Excelsior. Thanks to libav’s highly-parallelized makefiles.
There is only one problem with the Tinderbox, and is once again the logs analysis. To be honest this time I have some idea on how to proceed: the first step is to replace the grep command I have used before with a script that produces an HTML output of the log file. Yes many people said before that HTML is not a good idea for this kind of thing: since nobody else has helped me writing a better log analysis tool, that’s going to be enough.
So what has to happen is reading line by line the input log, then create an HTML file with (numbered) lines, marked with a specific (CSS) file that makes the row red. As I said before it would be nice to have some kind of javascript to jump from one error line to the other. Until this is all set, though, just creating the HTML file would be enough.
The next step would probably be getting the HTML output on S3 (for easy access), and write it down on a database that actually give you an index of the error logs — for those who wonder, using s3fs as PORT_LOGDIR is not a good idea at all. I guess tomorrow I might try to find some time to work on this. I could find some time on the weekend, given that my original idea (biking around with Luca) is disabled due to me falling and (lightly) injuring myself last night.