Re: [boost] The Future of Boost - CI

On Tue, May 9, 2023 at 4:21 PM Vinnie Falco via Boost wrote:

On Tue, May 9, 2023 at 2:04 PM Tom Kent via Boost wrote:

...

I'm happy to go with whatever the community is looking to do on this front. Some options as I see it:

* Keep the current test matrix as a compliment to the various CI systems starting to roll out. * Merge my runner system in with the new C++ Alliance CI system * Shutdown the test matrix and move fully to C++ Alliance cloud CI

We haven't put any thought or effort into how our CI might interface with the test matrix, so I think for now the best strategy is no strategy: Keep things as they are.

But... since we are talking about it, my inner tech geek is tickled by the idea of a decentralized network of runners using authors', maintainers', and contributors' already existing commodity hardware to run a specially prepared docker container that tests some configurations of boost libraries and reports the results to a central server.

While the execution of the current test matrix is somewhat flawed, I think the idea behind it is actually rather brilliant. In exchange for much longer turnaround times we get a depth of coverage that cannot be matched on cloud systems. And it is basically "free" since the computing model is inverted: the expensive compilation and testing is performed by numerous cheap developer machines with spare cycles, while the cheap collation and presentation of the results is handled by the cloud.

If we are going to improve the test matrix I think the way to do it is to treat it like any other software project. Assemble a team and start writing maintainable code with documentation. We probably want to use some off the shelf solution for deploying runners on people's PCs and laptops, and then write our own set of scripts and dockerfiles (?) which spread around the testing of all the different configurations of the libraries.

The most important part of this software project is to address the headaches of the current system: when there is a failure, it is difficult (and often impossible) to diagnose from the logs. There are many false positives and noisy things like warnings which have no possible resolution, and so on. In other words we will need to be able to open issues on the test matrix software, triage them, get the fixes for them in, have them tested, and then deploy a new version just like every other software project.

Once upon a time, while I was still the Testing Manager, I had the same idea and partially implemented it to run on Google cloud data services. But I just ran out of time and interest after that thing that happened. -- -- René Ferdinand Rivera Morell -- Don't Assume Anything -- No Supone Nada -- Robot Dreams - http://robot-dreams.net