Re: Proposed force push of staging to master

[George Dunlap <george.dunlap@eu.citrix.com>]

On 02/17/2014 12:08 PM, Ian Jackson wrote:
> xen.org writes ("[xen-unstable test] 24870: regressions - trouble: broken/fail/pass"):
>> flight 24870 xen-unstable real [real]
>> http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~xensrcts/logs/24870/
>>
>> Regressions :-(
>>
>> Tests which did not succeed and are blocking,
>> including tests which could not be run:
>>   build-i386-oldkern            3 host-build-prep       fail REGR. vs. 24862
> This was the "usual" failure: Citrix's intercepting web proxy causes
> some hg clones of linux-2.6.18.hg from xenbits to fail.  The rest of
> the flight was successful.
>
> The rest of the weekend's tests were badly affected by a disk failure
> on earwig.  So as a result we didn't get a push.
>
> I cleared out a bunch of other stuff running in the test system in an
> effort to get a pass sooner, but peeking at the results the same job
> has failed the same way in the currently-running flight.  So we won't
> get a push in that iteration either.
>
> We should consider doing a force push for RC4.  The risks are:
>   * There is something actually wrong with xen.git which causes the
>     32-bit 2.6.18 build to fail;
>   * Less resistance in the future to 2.6.18 build failures.
> I'll discuss these in turn.
>
> The build-*-oldkern tests involve using the kernel-building machinery
> in xen.git to clone 2.6.18 from xenbits and build it.  Firstly, I think
> it's unlikely that anything in xen.git#d883c179..4e8d89bc would affect
> that.  Secondly, the build-amd64-oldkern builds have passed.  So I
> think we can almost entirely discount the first risk.
>
> I think the second risk is tolerable.  We should keep an eye on it for
> a bit and if it turns out that the oldkern build really does become
> broken later and as a result keeps failing indefinitely, we will be
> able to spot that.
>
> So, we propose to push 4e8d89bc1445f91c4c6c7bf0ad8d51b0c809841e to
> xen.git#master and call it RC4.  Comments welcome.

Thanks for the analysis.  This seems like a good plan.

  -George