[petsc-dev] broken nightlybuilds (next vs next-tmp)

[Jed Brown]

Satish Balay <balay at mcs.anl.gov> writes:

> On Sat, 11 Nov 2017, Jed Brown wrote:
>
>> > I don't think we have the resources to run full tests on every branch one
>> > at a time. Do we?
>> 
>> No,
>
> Well the hope is - after the migration to new test suite is complete
> the cost of a full test run is lower. And we could somehow do fewer
> tests to capture most issues.
>
>> and after each merge of a branch to 'master', the prospective merge
>> of other branches would need to be retested.  But the idea that the
>> automated test suite is infallible is also flawed.
>
> Well arn't we relying on 'automated testing' with the current next
> model?

Some of us also run 'next' in daily work and fix issues as they appear
in that context.  There is also significant convenience in there being
one place we can go to reproduce all issues.

When testing separate branches, it isn't enough to merely test their
head, we would have to test the result of a candidate merge.  If there
are any conflicts, that merge needs to be done manually, but where would
we put it for automated testing?  Make a new branch
'candidate-merge-jed/foo-to-master' and push that, then look for results
several hours or a day later?  With 'next', we make merges to one place
and don't need a different workflow for no-conflict versus conflicted
merges.