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Carp is missing a dot #11814

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p5pRT opened this issue Dec 19, 2011 · 71 comments
Closed

Carp is missing a dot #11814

p5pRT opened this issue Dec 19, 2011 · 71 comments

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@p5pRT
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p5pRT commented Dec 19, 2011

Migrated from rt.perl.org#106538 (status was 'resolved')

Searchable as RT106538$

@p5pRT
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p5pRT commented Dec 19, 2011

From @cpansprout

This was brought up in #96672 but needs its own ticket​:

$ perl -e 'die'
Died at -e line 1.
$ perl -MCarp -e 'croak Died'
Died at -e line 1

Where did my dot go?

The hard part is deciding what to do about cluck().


Flags​:
  category=library
  severity=low


Site configuration information for perl 5.15.5​:

Configured by sprout at Sun Dec 18 11​:26​:14 PST 2011.

Summary of my perl5 (revision 5 version 15 subversion 5) configuration​:
  Snapshot of​: 5dca8ed
  Platform​:
  osname=darwin, osvers=10.5.0, archname=darwin-2level
  uname='darwin pint.local 10.5.0 darwin kernel version 10.5.0​: fri nov 5 23​:20​:39 pdt 2010; root​:xnu-1504.9.17~1release_i386 i386 '
  config_args='-de -Dusedevel -DDEBUGGING=-g'
  hint=recommended, useposix=true, d_sigaction=define
  useithreads=undef, usemultiplicity=undef
  useperlio=define, d_sfio=undef, uselargefiles=define, usesocks=undef
  use64bitint=undef, use64bitall=undef, uselongdouble=undef
  usemymalloc=n, bincompat5005=undef
  Compiler​:
  cc='cc', ccflags ='-fno-common -DPERL_DARWIN -fno-strict-aliasing -pipe -fstack-protector -I/usr/local/include',
  optimize='-O3 -g',
  cppflags='-fno-common -DPERL_DARWIN -fno-strict-aliasing -pipe -fstack-protector -I/usr/local/include'
  ccversion='', gccversion='4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5664)', gccosandvers=''
  intsize=4, longsize=4, ptrsize=4, doublesize=8, byteorder=1234
  d_longlong=define, longlongsize=8, d_longdbl=define, longdblsize=16
  ivtype='long', ivsize=4, nvtype='double', nvsize=8, Off_t='off_t', lseeksize=8
  alignbytes=8, prototype=define
  Linker and Libraries​:
  ld='env MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.3 cc', ldflags =' -fstack-protector -L/usr/local/lib'
  libpth=/usr/local/lib /usr/lib
  libs=-ldbm -ldl -lm -lutil -lc
  perllibs=-ldl -lm -lutil -lc
  libc=, so=dylib, useshrplib=false, libperl=libperl.a
  gnulibc_version=''
  Dynamic Linking​:
  dlsrc=dl_dlopen.xs, dlext=bundle, d_dlsymun=undef, ccdlflags=' '
  cccdlflags=' ', lddlflags=' -bundle -undefined dynamic_lookup -L/usr/local/lib -fstack-protector'

Locally applied patches​:
 


@​INC for perl 5.15.5​:
  /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.15.5/darwin-2level
  /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.15.5
  /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.15.5/darwin-2level
  /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.15.5
  /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl
  .


Environment for perl 5.15.5​:
  DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH (unset)
  HOME=/Users/sprout
  LANG=en_US.UTF-8
  LANGUAGE (unset)
  LD_LIBRARY_PATH (unset)
  LOGDIR (unset)
  PATH=/usr/bin​:/bin​:/usr/sbin​:/sbin​:/usr/local/bin​:/usr/X11/bin​:/usr/local/bin
  PERL_BADLANG (unset)
  SHELL=/bin/bash

@p5pRT
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p5pRT commented Feb 2, 2012

From @cpansprout

On Sun Dec 18 19​:56​:10 2011, sprout wrote​:

This was brought up in #96672 but needs its own ticket​:

$ perl -e 'die'
Died at -e line 1.
$ perl -MCarp -e 'croak Died'
Died at -e line 1

Where did my dot go?

The hard part is deciding what to do about cluck().

In commit 879b0ca, Zefram has solved this by adding the dot to
messages but leaving it off for subsequent lines of cluck() output.

--

Father Chrysostomos

@p5pRT
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p5pRT commented Feb 2, 2012

From [Unknown Contact. See original ticket]

On Sun Dec 18 19​:56​:10 2011, sprout wrote​:

This was brought up in #96672 but needs its own ticket​:

$ perl -e 'die'
Died at -e line 1.
$ perl -MCarp -e 'croak Died'
Died at -e line 1

Where did my dot go?

The hard part is deciding what to do about cluck().

In commit 879b0ca, Zefram has solved this by adding the dot to
messages but leaving it off for subsequent lines of cluck() output.

--

Father Chrysostomos

@p5pRT
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p5pRT commented Feb 2, 2012

@cpansprout - Status changed from 'new' to 'resolved'

@p5pRT p5pRT closed this as completed Feb 2, 2012
@p5pRT
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p5pRT commented Feb 2, 2012

From zefram@fysh.org

Father Chrysostomos wrote​:

Where did my dot go?

Added to Carp as 879b0ca. This required
changing an autodie test, in partial violation of UPSTREAM=>"cpan".
autodie will need a new CPAN release with that change. (Also had to
change a handful of core-only tests.)

The hard part is deciding what to do about cluck().

I added the dot only to the base message, and left the stack trace
unaltered. I don't see what punctuation would be appropriate at the
end of every stack trace line, and I don't want to make the last line
of it different from the others.

-zefram

@p5pRT
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p5pRT commented Feb 2, 2012

From @Leont

On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 5​:39 PM, Father Chrysostomos via RT
<perlbug-comment@​perl.org> wrote​:

In commit 879b0ca, Zefram has solved this by adding the dot to
messages but leaving it off for subsequent lines of cluck() output.

I'm worried this will break tests of CPAN modules that rely a little
too much on the exact error (probably including at least one of my
modules).

Leon

@p5pRT
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p5pRT commented Feb 2, 2012

From zefram@fysh.org

Leon Timmermans wrote​:

I'm worried this will break tests of CPAN modules

There presumably will be a few. It's an easy fix for each. I think it's
an acceptable level of hassle. If you object, you've got two weeks to
render it contentious so that it has to be reverted. I'm holding off
on CPAN release for this reason.

-zefram

@p5pRT
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p5pRT commented Feb 2, 2012

From @Leont

On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 6​:00 PM, Zefram <zefram@​fysh.org> wrote​:

There presumably will be a few.  It's an easy fix for each.  I think it's
an acceptable level of hassle.  If you object, you've got two weeks to
render it contentious so that it has to be reverted.  I'm holding off
on CPAN release for this reason.

I'm fine with updating my module, it's trivial indeed. I'm worried
though that the list of modules with this issue is larger than
expected. We'll see soon enough how big the issue is.

Leon

@p5pRT
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p5pRT commented Feb 10, 2012

From @toddr

On Thu Feb 02 09​:17​:06 2012, LeonT wrote​:

On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 6​:00 PM, Zefram <zefram@​fysh.org> wrote​:

There presumably will be a few. �It's an easy fix for each. �I think it's
an acceptable level of hassle. �If you object, you've got two weeks to
render it contentious so that it has to be reverted. �I'm holding off
on CPAN release for this reason.

I'm fine with updating my module, it's trivial indeed. I'm worried
though that the list of modules with this issue is larger than
expected. We'll see soon enough how big the issue is.

So far, I've found needed test fixes in​: autodie, Error, Log4perl and counting.

@p5pRT
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p5pRT commented Feb 10, 2012

From zefram@fysh.org

Todd Rinaldo via RT wrote​:

So far, I've found needed test fixes in​: autodie, Error, Log4perl and counting.

Not very many, then. This is looking viable.

-zefram

@p5pRT
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p5pRT commented Feb 11, 2012

From @hvds

"Todd Rinaldo via RT" <perlbug-followup@​perl.org> wrote​:
:On Thu Feb 02 09​:17​:06 2012, LeonT wrote​:
:> On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 6​:00 PM, Zefram <zefram@​fysh.org> wrote​:
:> > There presumably will be a few. �It's an easy fix for each. �I think it's
:> > an acceptable level of hassle. �If you object, you've got two weeks to
:> > render it contentious so that it has to be reverted. �I'm holding off
:> > on CPAN release for this reason.
:>
:> I'm fine with updating my module, it's trivial indeed. I'm worried
:> though that the list of modules with this issue is larger than
:> expected. We'll see soon enough how big the issue is.
:
:So far, I've found needed test fixes in​: autodie, Error, Log4perl and counting.

One thing worth mentioning​: along the lines of Nick's recent patch to
separate two otherwise indistinguishable panics in perl core, there is
actually an advantage to being able to discover from where an error
message came.

Maybe the presence or absence of a trailing full-stop is not the ideal
way to signal provenance; but I think the general principle stands that
you actually do lose something by making the two identical.

Hugo

@p5pRT
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p5pRT commented Feb 11, 2012

From @tsee

On 02/10/2012 05​:01 PM, Zefram wrote​:

Todd Rinaldo via RT wrote​:

So far, I've found needed test fixes in​: autodie, Error, Log4perl and counting.

Not very many, then. This is looking viable.

If somebody supplies me with two commits to run a CPAN smoke for, then I
can do that within a few days to get a more complete list.

--Steffen

@p5pRT
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p5pRT commented Feb 11, 2012

From zefram@fysh.org

Steffen Mueller wrote​:

If somebody supplies me with two commits to run a CPAN smoke for,
then I can do that within a few days to get a more complete list.

Obvious choice is 62e9075 (before)
and 879b0ca (after).

-zefram

@p5pRT
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p5pRT commented Feb 11, 2012

From @demerphq

On 11 February 2012 11​:15, <hv@​crypt.org> wrote​:

"Todd Rinaldo via RT" <perlbug-followup@​perl.org> wrote​:
:On Thu Feb 02 09​:17​:06 2012, LeonT wrote​:
:> On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 6​:00 PM, Zefram <zefram@​fysh.org> wrote​:
:> > There presumably will be a few. �It's an easy fix for each. �I think it's
:> > an acceptable level of hassle. �If you object, you've got two weeks to
:> > render it contentious so that it has to be reverted. �I'm holding off
:> > on CPAN release for this reason.
:>
:> I'm fine with updating my module, it's trivial indeed. I'm worried
:> though that the list of modules with this issue is larger than
:> expected. We'll see soon enough how big the issue is.
:
:So far, I've found needed test fixes in​: autodie, Error, Log4perl and counting.

One thing worth mentioning​: along the lines of Nick's recent patch to
separate two otherwise indistinguishable panics in perl core, there is
actually an advantage to being able to discover from where an error
message came.

Maybe the presence or absence of a trailing full-stop is not the ideal
way to signal provenance; but I think the general principle stands that
you actually do lose something by making the two identical.

I agree. I'm pretty sure at least one port of perl adds error codes to
all the error messages we provide. I have always thought that that is
a very useful thing. Especially when messages are localized, or
whatever. Id like to see a unique error code added to every error and
warning generating line of code in the core, and if I thought it would
be approved I'd do the work to make it happen.

cheers,
Yves

--
perl -Mre=debug -e "/just|another|perl|hacker/"

@p5pRT
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p5pRT commented Feb 11, 2012

From @tsee

On 02/11/2012 11​:42 AM, Zefram wrote​:

Steffen Mueller wrote​:

If somebody supplies me with two commits to run a CPAN smoke for,
then I can do that within a few days to get a more complete list.

Obvious choice is 62e9075 (before)
and 879b0ca (after).

Running at

http​://users.perl5.git.perl.org/~tsee/progress.html

Result to be at

http​://users.perl5.git.perl.org/~tsee/carp_errmsg/

Best regards,
Steffen

@p5pRT
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p5pRT commented Feb 11, 2012

From @rurban

On Sat, Feb 11, 2012 at 7​:30 AM, Steffen Mueller <smueller@​cpan.org> wrote​:

On 02/11/2012 11​:42 AM, Zefram wrote​:

Steffen Mueller wrote​:

If somebody supplies me with two commits to run a CPAN smoke for,
then I can do that within a few days to get a more complete list.

Obvious choice is 62e9075 (before)
and 879b0ca (after).

Running at

http​://users.perl5.git.perl.org/~tsee/progress.html

Result to be at

http​://users.perl5.git.perl.org/~tsee/carp_errmsg/

Excellent. Muchas gracias!
Problem was that maintainers often did not have blead and there is no
Carp-1.25 in CPAN yet, so it was not easy to detect or reproduce.

We provided patches for all but Sub-Uplevel-0.22
I think DAGOLDEN can handle it by himself.
--
Reini Urban
http​://cpanel.net/   http​://www.perl-compiler.org/

@p5pRT
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p5pRT commented Feb 13, 2012

From @rjbs

* demerphq <demerphq@​gmail.com> [2012-02-11T06​:28​:21]

I agree. I'm pretty sure at least one port of perl adds error codes to
all the error messages we provide. I have always thought that that is
a very useful thing. Especially when messages are localized, or
whatever. Id like to see a unique error code added to every error and
warning generating line of code in the core, and if I thought it would
be approved I'd do the work to make it happen.

This is something I'd hoped to see quite a while ago, as part of a "exceptions
are objects" update. I'd like to pursue this, for sure, but am probably not
going to give it a front burner in my brain until 5.17. I will save and review
all proposals on it, though!

We had talked about giving exceptions tags as well, at the time.

--
rjbs

@p5pRT
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p5pRT commented Feb 15, 2012

From zefram@fysh.org

Steffen Mueller wrote​:

http​://users.perl5.git.perl.org/~tsee/carp_errmsg/

Not yet complete, but now showing 28 distros that passed before and fail
after and 20 that changed behaviour in some other way. Anyone want to
argue that it's too many?

-zefram

@p5pRT
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p5pRT commented Feb 15, 2012

From @rurban

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 5​:42 AM, Zefram <zefram@​fysh.org> wrote​:

Steffen Mueller wrote​:

http​://users.perl5.git.perl.org/~tsee/carp_errmsg/

Not yet complete, but now showing 28 distros that passed before and fail
after and 20 that changed behaviour in some other way.  Anyone want to
argue that it's too many?

This made a lot of people angry, not only people who had their CPAN modules
changed for purley aesthetic consistency reasons.

Carp's only API is the string return value.
Additionally carp is with die our primary exception mechanism.

Changing the API would have required an API bump, like Carp2 or use Carp (-dot).
But that is already over, so I'm content with that change.
It was only a night of work to get CPAN fixed and all authors took the fixes.
--
Reini Urban
http​://cpanel.net/   http​://www.perl-compiler.org/

@p5pRT
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p5pRT commented Feb 15, 2012

From zefram@fysh.org

Reini Urban wrote​:

This made a lot of people angry,

Anything you can point at? Blogs?

But that is already over, so I'm content with that change.

It's not a done deal. The dot change only exists in blead. I've
deliberately held off from making a CPAN release until we've made a
decision on whether we actually want it. The smoke tests that we get
from having it in blead are an important input to that decision.

In five days we'll have a 5.15.8 release, and whatever version of Carp it
has will also go to CPAN. If the dot remains in, that's when it becomes
widely visible. If we want the dot out, best to take it out before then.
That's why I'm asking now. If we leave it in at 5.15.8 and decide later
that we need it out for 5.16, we can do that, but it's messier.

It was only a night of work to get CPAN fixed and all authors took the fixes.

By "CPAN" do you mean "all of the affected modules on CPAN"? I believe
we don't have a final tally of them yet.

-zefram

@p5pRT
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p5pRT commented Feb 15, 2012

From @rurban

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 11​:07 AM, Zefram <zefram@​fysh.org> wrote​:

Reini Urban wrote​:

This made a lot of people angry,

Anything you can point at?  Blogs?

Not publicly. Normal people do not blog or complain
upstream at the interior ministry. Ask around.

But that is already over, so I'm content with that change.

It's not a done deal.  The dot change only exists in blead.  I've
deliberately held off from making a CPAN release until we've made a
decision on whether we actually want it.  The smoke tests that we get
from having it in blead are an important input to that decision.

In five days we'll have a 5.15.8 release, and whatever version of Carp it
has will also go to CPAN.  If the dot remains in, that's when it becomes
widely visible.  If we want the dot out, best to take it out before then.
That's why I'm asking now.  If we leave it in at 5.15.8 and decide later
that we need it out for 5.16, we can do that, but it's messier.

It was only a night of work to get CPAN fixed and all authors took the fixes.

By "CPAN" do you mean "all of the affected modules on CPAN"?  I believe
we don't have a final tally of them yet.

"All of CPAN" we use, that is 652 of 29916 packages. The most common fraction.
--
Reini Urban
http​://cpanel.net/   http​://www.perl-compiler.org/

@p5pRT
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p5pRT commented Feb 15, 2012

From @doy

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 11​:27​:01AM -0600, Reini Urban wrote​:

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 11​:07 AM, Zefram <zefram@​fysh.org> wrote​:

Reini Urban wrote​:

This made a lot of people angry,

Anything you can point at?  Blogs?

Not publicly. Normal people do not blog or complain
upstream at the interior ministry. Ask around.

So how are we to know that they exist? We can't really go around asking
every Perl user about every change that we make to core, and we can't
just stop making changes to core. What is the solution here?

-doy

@p5pRT
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p5pRT commented Feb 15, 2012

From @rurban

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 11​:36 AM, Jesse Luehrs <doy@​tozt.net> wrote​:

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 11​:27​:01AM -0600, Reini Urban wrote​:

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 11​:07 AM, Zefram <zefram@​fysh.org> wrote​:

Reini Urban wrote​:

This made a lot of people angry,

Anything you can point at?  Blogs?

Not publicly. Normal people do not blog or complain
upstream at the interior ministry. Ask around.

So how are we to know that they exist? We can't really go around asking
every Perl user about every change that we make to core, and we can't
just stop making changes to core. What is the solution here?

Make the right decisions.
Don't upset people too much.
use common sense. yes, marc lehman is right most of the time
--
Reini Urban
http​://cpanel.net/   http​://www.perl-compiler.org/

@p5pRT
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p5pRT commented Feb 15, 2012

From @doy

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 12​:38​:39PM -0600, Reini Urban wrote​:

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 11​:36 AM, Jesse Luehrs <doy@​tozt.net> wrote​:

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 11​:27​:01AM -0600, Reini Urban wrote​:

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 11​:07 AM, Zefram <zefram@​fysh.org> wrote​:

Reini Urban wrote​:

This made a lot of people angry,

Anything you can point at?  Blogs?

Not publicly. Normal people do not blog or complain
upstream at the interior ministry. Ask around.

So how are we to know that they exist? We can't really go around asking
every Perl user about every change that we make to core, and we can't
just stop making changes to core. What is the solution here?

Make the right decisions.

Oh, is it really that easy?

-doy

@p5pRT
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p5pRT commented Feb 15, 2012

From @rurban

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 12​:40 PM, Jesse Luehrs <doy@​tozt.net> wrote​:

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 12​:38​:39PM -0600, Reini Urban wrote​:

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 11​:36 AM, Jesse Luehrs <doy@​tozt.net> wrote​:

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 11​:27​:01AM -0600, Reini Urban wrote​:

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 11​:07 AM, Zefram <zefram@​fysh.org> wrote​:

Reini Urban wrote​:

This made a lot of people angry,

Anything you can point at?  Blogs?

Not publicly. Normal people do not blog or complain
upstream at the interior ministry. Ask around.

So how are we to know that they exist? We can't really go around asking
every Perl user about every change that we make to core, and we can't
just stop making changes to core. What is the solution here?

Make the right decisions.

Oh, is it really that easy?

Sorry, I forgot​: marketing.

Persuade people why they must change their code.
Before people like me jump on them on other more-general aspects.
--
Reini Urban
http​://cpanel.net/   http​://www.perl-compiler.org/

@p5pRT
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p5pRT commented Feb 15, 2012

From @doy

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 12​:42​:02PM -0600, Reini Urban wrote​:

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 12​:40 PM, Jesse Luehrs <doy@​tozt.net> wrote​:

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 12​:38​:39PM -0600, Reini Urban wrote​:

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 11​:36 AM, Jesse Luehrs <doy@​tozt.net> wrote​:

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 11​:27​:01AM -0600, Reini Urban wrote​:

On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 11​:07 AM, Zefram <zefram@​fysh.org> wrote​:

Reini Urban wrote​:

This made a lot of people angry,

Anything you can point at?  Blogs?

Not publicly. Normal people do not blog or complain
upstream at the interior ministry. Ask around.

So how are we to know that they exist? We can't really go around asking
every Perl user about every change that we make to core, and we can't
just stop making changes to core. What is the solution here?

Make the right decisions.

Oh, is it really that easy?

Sorry, I forgot​: marketing.

Persuade people why they must change their code.
Before people like me jump on them on other more-general aspects.

Which people? The only method of communication we have with the majority
of Perl users is through deprecation warnings.

-doy

@p5pRT
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p5pRT commented Feb 16, 2012

From @rjbs

* Zefram <zefram@​fysh.org> [2012-02-15T06​:42​:56]

Steffen Mueller wrote​:

http​://users.perl5.git.perl.org/~tsee/carp_errmsg/

Not yet complete, but now showing 28 distros that passed before and fail
after and 20 that changed behaviour in some other way. Anyone want to
argue that it's too many?

It's a bummer that, if released, this will be the second change to this
behavior. I hope nobody will be too put out having to fix tests a second time.

I think this should be corrected. Hopefully the next changes we have to make
on this front will be "replace the stack and exception mechanism with something
was awesomer" and not "add a missing dot!"

I had a quick glance over the smoke changes looking for core modules and the
only one that leaped out at me was autodie; presumably we can fix that in core
if we can't get Paul to issue a new version immediately.

Reini suggested on IRC, today, that he had already been in touch with all the
affected authors. Has this really been done? That would be great!

--
rjbs

@p5pRT
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p5pRT commented Feb 16, 2012

From @tsee

On 02/16/2012 02​:03 AM, Ricardo Signes wrote​:

* Zefram<zefram@​fysh.org> [2012-02-15T06​:42​:56]

Steffen Mueller wrote​:

http​://users.perl5.git.perl.org/~tsee/carp_errmsg/

Not yet complete, but now showing 28 distros that passed before and fail
after and 20 that changed behaviour in some other way. Anyone want to
argue that it's too many?

It's a bummer that, if released, this will be the second change to this
behavior. I hope nobody will be too put out having to fix tests a second time.

I think this should be corrected. Hopefully the next changes we have to make
on this front will be "replace the stack and exception mechanism with something
was awesomer" and not "add a missing dot!"

I had a quick glance over the smoke changes looking for core modules and the
only one that leaped out at me was autodie; presumably we can fix that in core
if we can't get Paul to issue a new version immediately.

Reini suggested on IRC, today, that he had already been in touch with all the
affected authors. Has this really been done? That would be great!

Now up to ~30-35 degradations. Reini qualified his statement as "the
authors of all modules that we [presumably cPanel] use" which was on the
order of 600-700 out of tens of thousands modules on the CPAN. Since
authors of infrequently used modules are as likely to hard-core error
messages, I'd say that this is not yet a done deal.

I expect that at least a handful of the modules would require taking
over to make a new release or else they're dead wood.

--Steffen

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p5pRT commented Feb 16, 2012

From zefram@fysh.org

Ricardo Signes wrote​:

I had a quick glance over the smoke changes looking for core modules and the
only one that leaped out at me was autodie; presumably we can fix that in core

My commit to modify Carp did edit the autodie test in core. But not in
the correct way for the CPAN version​: I changed it to *require* the dot,
which is OK in core, but the CPAN version needs to make the dot optional.

-zefram

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p5pRT commented Feb 29, 2012

From @rjbs

* "Andreas J. Koenig" [2012-02-29T02​:18​:50]

On Tue, 28 Feb 2012 20​:19​:57 -0500, Chris Prather <chris@​prather.org> said​:

[ ... ]
Nope. I'd say we blew it major way.

Changing such a heavily used module in a rush a few days before freeze
is not as excusable as you put it. Such a relatively irrelevant change
should have been postponed to the early phases of the next release
cycle. It was put into blead trunk. Instead of a smoke-me branch. And
Steffen's parallel smoke setup should have been involved *before* a
merge into blead trunk was even considered.

Steffen's smoke setup *was* involved, and the output was compared, and we
found some 25-30 breakages. I said we should merge the change on the
assumption that getting it into blead would be more likely to get more
problems to the surface, and that should these problems seriously change the
scope of the expected breakage, we could revert the change.

There were some problems with this assumption, some of which have been
pointed out, and some of which have not.

* "Andreas J. Koenig" [2012-02-29T02​:18​:50]

Sub​::Uplevel was effected and reported. Since it is part of the
toolchain it broke the smoke process for *everything* for a few days.

For example, I didn't realize that the smoke reporting toolchain was affected
like this. I'd seen Sub-Uplevel on the list, and considered the number of
things hiding behind it, but not how they'd affect the reporters themselves.
This was a tactical blunder.

* "Andreas J. Koenig" [2012-02-29T02​:18​:50]

A cheap excuse. We should stand to our mistakes. Development should slow
down in February and such changes should not be tried out in the trunk
ever. Let's put this into our book of mistakes that should not have
happened.

With hindsight, I would have done things differently. I don't agree that
"changes should not be tried in the trunk, ever" though. As it stands now,
smoke-me branches tend to get only smoking of the core tests. We don't have
smoke-me CPAN smokers, other than Steffen, who must be asked to do it, and
must set it up by hand. That means that getting an experimental change into
blead, if the change doesn't break core, is a totally viable way to *then*
get CPAN smoke reports.

...as long as it doesn't break smoke reports.

As for it being February​: yes, it was pretty late in the game. As Zefram
suggested, I was emboldened by the *other* recent changes to Carp, which
had already been release as stable to CPAN without causing massive chaos.

What I overlooked as that they changed the error message in a *much* smaller
set of cases. That is​: I was thinking that the same set of people, give or
take a small fraction, would be affected by this change. I think that's the
most significant mistake I made. Had that been true, I think I'd still be
pretty sanguine with how things went.

* demerphq [2012-02-29T03​:17​:05]

I think you have somewhat of a point, especially as regards timing.
However I think the counterpoint is that people should not be testing
raw output from core modules in the way that caused problems. We make
no commitments as to a particular output format in Carp, so hard
testing a snapshot of its output is unwise.

I'm not really happy with this counter-argument. The problem is that yes,
people shouldn't be relying on the exact string output. They should be
relying on an unchanging simple error identification API... which we don't
provide.

I thought about this, too, and hoped that by the next time we wanted to talk
about changing this stuff, it would be to create the core exception types,
and that we'd be doing the one last bodge-without-massive-improvement change
now, preparing things for the future when these errors would be the same type
of thing, and would necessarily stringify the same way.

This was only a very minor consideration, though.

* demerphq [2012-02-29T03​:17​:05]

For instance, they could have checked to see if a fragment of the carp
output that was relevant to them.

In a nutshell​: many did. For example, they only looked at the first line,
which changed. If they tested for m{^You died at Foo.pm, line 2$} and we
complain that this was too specific, what would we have them change? It's
reasonable to check that it came from the same place. So they should've
amended that to m{...line 2(?​:[^0-9]|$)} or something? Bleh. I think that
the affected test cases I saw were not unreasonable, in most cases.

* Chris Prather [2012-02-29T05​:32​:57]

Should then *all* changes go through a smoke-me change?

Certainly, many more of them should than now do. More of them should have a
CPAN regression test. There are quite a few problems with making this a hard
requirement, though, which boil down to shortages in resources, both human
and computer.

* Zefram [2012-02-29T06​:40​:12]

Not quite the right criterion. We *did* know that this change would break
some proportion of CPAN, and that a full-CPAN smoke test would be useful.
This is not the case for most core changes, contentious or otherwise.
We could (and I won't dispute that we should) have run the full-CPAN
smoke test with the change parked on a branch, rather than putting it
into blead first.

Well, we *did* run it through a CPAN smoke. The problem was not looking at
the list of affected dists, noting which were dependencies for other
libraries (especially significant trees), fixing those, and then re-smoking.

As I said much earlier, I thought we'd be able to revert the change if we
determined it was a bigger problem than we'd expected. Now I'm concerned
that this is not true, because somehow this got propagated as a way to fix
the problem​:

  $pattern .= $Carp​::VERSION gt "1.24" ? "." :"";

...which means that a reversion in 1.30 would require all the libraries that
were fixed in this way to be fixed *again*!

* Zefram [2012-02-29T06​:40​:12]

What would have made a difference here, and in similar situations, is an
easy way to invoke the full-CPAN smoke test. We have smoke-me branches
for testing a change across architectures and build options; I'd like to
see a cpan-smoke-me mechanism for testing a change across CPAN distros.

I agree wholeheartedly. It's a lot of work to make this happen, but it would
be phenomenally useful, even if it was limited to one architecture and build.
Especially if the mechanism was easy to re-use as more computing resources
became available.

* Zefram [2012-02-29T06​:40​:12]

Overall, I don't think we totally bungled this, as Andreas surmised.
We anticipated pain, and we took steps to measure and manage that pain,
albeit imperfectly. It's a could-do-better.

This is my feeling, too. I made a judgment call, and in hindsight, I would
have made it differently. Frustratingly, I believe I had all the information
I needed to make the right one, and simply didn't put it all together at the
time.

But I don't plan to fall on my sword over this. I just plan to keep it in
mind at similar junctures in the future.

--
rjbs

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p5pRT commented Feb 29, 2012

From @demerphq

On 29 February 2012 15​:26, Ricardo Signes <perl.p5p@​rjbs.manxome.org> wrote​:

* demerphq [2012-02-29T03​:17​:05]

I think you have somewhat of a point, especially as regards timing.
However I think the counterpoint is that people should not be testing
raw output from core modules in the way that caused problems. We make
no commitments as to a particular output format in Carp, so hard
testing a snapshot of its output is unwise.

I'm not really happy with this counter-argument.  The problem is that yes,
people shouldn't be relying on the exact string output.  They should be
relying on an unchanging simple error identification API... which we don't
provide.

That focuses too much on the details of the instant case. You need to
zoom out and see how this is just an instance of a class of issues
that we have in Perl dev, and that we simply cannot provide the kind
of guarantee that people want for this kind of stuff.

On the other hand, I agree with your point. When I dealt with the
regex modifiers I actually created routines so people could access
their patterns in such way that they could test that they had created
the right ones without being sensitive to things like what modifiers
we include in the pattern. So I am sympathetic with your proposed
solution to the instant problem. But your reservations don't address
the bigger issue. We simply cannot be hand-cuffed in what we change in
Perl by people establishing hard dependencies on things we have not
made promises about. If we do then we basically will never be able to
release a change, fix bugs, correct typos, whatnot.

I thought about this, too, and hoped that by the next time we wanted to talk
about changing this stuff, it would be to create the core exception types,
and that we'd be doing the one last bodge-without-massive-improvement change
now, preparing things for the future when these errors would be the same type
of thing, and would necessarily stringify the same way.

This was only a very minor consideration, though.

I like the general idea. But again, it does not address my core point
of commenting on this thread.

* demerphq [2012-02-29T03​:17​:05]

For instance, they could have checked to see if a fragment of the carp
output that was relevant to them.

In a nutshell​: many did.  For example, they only looked at the first line,
which changed.  If they tested for m{^You died at Foo.pm, line 2$} and we
complain that this was too specific, what would we have them change?  It's
reasonable to check that it came from the same place.  So they should've
amended that to m{...line 2(?​:[^0-9]|$)} or something?  Bleh.  I think that
the affected test cases I saw were not unreasonable, in most cases.

How about

  ok($@​=/You died/ && $@​=/Foo\.pm/ && $@​=~/line 2\b/);

Anyway, the core point here is that if we have not made a promise
about some feature then no-one can complain when change it. Its that
simple. If a programmer decides to use unpublished API's in the Perl
core and we remove them then its that programmers problem, not ours.

I mean consider the massive list of things that we might have to worry
about. Do we have to worry about backwards compatibility if we change
the format of Devel​::Peek output? What about the re=debug output? What
about correcting typos in warning messages? The list is virtually
endless.

Anyway, all this aside, my view is that our default choice of action
should always be to do things in such a way that it causes the least
friction in the community but that we reserve the right to change
things that we have not committed to keeping unchanged.

Yves

--
perl -Mre=debug -e "/just|another|perl|hacker/"

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p5pRT commented Feb 29, 2012

From @rjbs

* demerphq <demerphq@​gmail.com> [2012-02-29T09​:52​:01]

So I am sympathetic with your proposed solution to the instant problem. But
your reservations don't address the bigger issue. We simply cannot be
hand-cuffed in what we change in Perl by people establishing hard
dependencies on things we have not made promises about. If we do then we
basically will never be able to release a change, fix bugs, correct typos,
whatnot.

I totally agree with you on this general point.

--
rjbs

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p5pRT commented Feb 29, 2012

From @greerga

On Wed, 29 Feb 2012, Nicholas Clark wrote​:

In that, we need to avoid spamming with false positives. What *we* here are
interested in is whether a change to blead broke the reporter modules.
We don't want to confuse that with the modules themselves breaking. And it's
not *that* easy to control the local CPAN mirror updates. So, probably one
wants to do this​:

0) snapshot CPAN. (eg, private local copy of CPAN, updated by this build
script)
1) build blead with *parent of current commit* (5 minutes on fast hardware
in parallel)
2) build reporter toolchain
a) if it fails at this point, bail out as a "skip". (Warn about this?)
b) otherwise continue
3) clean everything
4) build blead with current commit
5) build reporter toolchain (identical CPAN)

and that's then "pass" or "fail",
and conclusively did *this* blead commit break things

I had a script that did CPAN testers smoking against blead/maint-X that I
stopped running a while ago because of the switch to metabase. Essentially
it​:

1) updated a minicpan
2) pulled and built blead or maint-X
3) did a CPAN testers module install from CPAN #1 with perl #2
4) ran CPAN testers against all the modules from #1 with perl from #2
5) go to #1

I had wanted to make it smarter so it kept state of the modules but
dealing with all the modules that hung during tests was a pain and took up
a lot of time, even with Andreas' blacklist.

When I get home I'll see if I still have that around, at least. It
might've been deleted during one of the Test​::Smoke "delete everything"
events.

--
George Greer

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p5pRT commented Feb 29, 2012

From @greerga

On Wed, 29 Feb 2012, Nicholas Clark wrote​:

The thing that *would* have got it is a "build all of CPAN", which we don't
have the resources to do for every change. So it gets down to - how do we
spot which changes need that sort of thing?

If I can get a copy of the "build all of CPAN" script that the comparisons
from a while ago were done with, I can try to set it up on a rolling
basis. That is, it would compare blead from the last pass with whatever
was blead at the start of the next pass. So it wouldn't be every change
but it would at least be more than never.

Should then *all* changes go through a smoke-me change? I treat all of

I'd actually be happy if (nearly) all non-doc changes *did*. But it wouldn't
have caught this one.

(We'd need to improve the smoke-me reporting infrastructure to make this
useful though)

What's on your wishlist?

--
George Greer

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p5pRT commented Feb 29, 2012

From alex.hartmaier@gmail.com

Maybe I wasn't clear enough​: if blead breaks some module on CPAN that's
'fine'.
But the problem wasn't blead but releasing a new version of Carp to CPAN
which broke all stable Perl version installations.

I don't see how a blead smoke prevents that from happening for a dual-lifed
module.
A warning in the Carp changelog would have helped (I read all changelogs
before upgrading modules) if it was known at the time of release.
This kind of problem could only be solved by rerunning the tests of all
downstream dependencies of a module after it has been updated which would
require the test suites installed or redownloaded from CPAN.

-Alex (abraxxa)

On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 4​:46 PM, George Greer <perl@​greerga.m-l.org> wrote​:

On Wed, 29 Feb 2012, Nicholas Clark wrote​:

The thing that *would* have got it is a "build all of CPAN", which we

don't
have the resources to do for every change. So it gets down to - how do we
spot which changes need that sort of thing?

If I can get a copy of the "build all of CPAN" script that the comparisons
from a while ago were done with, I can try to set it up on a rolling basis.
That is, it would compare blead from the last pass with whatever was blead
at the start of the next pass. So it wouldn't be every change but it would
at least be more than never.

Should then *all* changes go through a smoke-me change? I treat all of

I'd actually be happy if (nearly) all non-doc changes *did*. But it
wouldn't
have caught this one.

(We'd need to improve the smoke-me reporting infrastructure to make this
useful though)

What's on your wishlist?

--
George Greer

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p5pRT commented Feb 29, 2012

From zefram@fysh.org

Alexander Hartmaier wrote​:

But the problem wasn't blead but releasing a new version of Carp to CPAN
which broke all stable Perl version installations.

Interesting. It doesn't break *all* installations, but only those that
upgrade Carp from CPAN. Since nothing at all declares a recent Carp
as a versioned dependency (because Carp was only recently dual-lifed),
you'll only get a Carp upgrade if you specifically choose to upgrade it
or you blanket upgrade everything. Presumably that's what you're doing
to have run into it. We have some blanket rebuilding of dependencies at
my work, and ran into Carp breaking tests for an internal module (that
I'd written). I wonder how common a practice it is to systematically
upgrade everything.

Some of the recent dual-life Carp versions have had more or less subtle
portability problems for Perl 5.6. I didn't get any bug reports about
this -- just ran into the problems myself in my routine CPAN testing --
so I presume that 5.6 users, at least, are not blanket upgrading.

I don't see how a blead smoke prevents that from happening for a dual-lifed
module.

A smoke test of blead *against CPAN* (not just against the blead test
suite) detects exactly this situation. Indeed, we did come up with a
list of affected CPAN modules, before perl-5.15.8 and Carp-1.25 went out.
If it had been a CPAN-only module then it could not have been tackled
by any kind of blead smoke.

A warning in the Carp changelog would have helped

The change was noted, but not explicitly marked as significant. Would a
"significant change​:" label on that entry have caught your attention
sufficiently? I've used "incompatible change​:" a couple of times,
but that doesn't seem an appropriate categorisation for this change.

-zefram

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p5pRT commented Feb 29, 2012

From @tsee

On 02/29/2012 11​:57 AM, Nicholas Clark wrote​:

The thing that *would* have got it is a "build all of CPAN", which we don't
have the resources to do for every change. So it gets down to - how do we
spot which changes need that sort of thing?

It's not just that. While I did expend the effort to write tools for
CPAN smoking (hacky, yeah, I'll admit that) which have step-by-step
instructions, and are all set up on a machine that all committers have
access to, I'm still the only one who's ever volunteered to use it to do
CPAN smokes.

I suppose I could fill the gap between "run the following couple of
commands, wait, look at HTML report" to get "click on the following
button on a web page, wait, look at HTML report". But I doubt THAT level
of automation is going to help very much. :(

I think the key thing that was missing here was realising that this change
broke the CPAN smokers *reporting* setup. Which would have cut off reports,
and hence hidden the problems.

Regular automated smoke testing to be sure that the reporting setup isn't
broken seems like the first thing to fix. Unlike "all of CPAN", doing that
on a fast cycle seems tractable.

Yes, but requires a fair amount of effort to set up and maintain. That's
not free, particularly, since it'll be one of the people doing it that
are otherwise spending their time on *different* useful stuff

--Steffen

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p5pRT commented Feb 29, 2012

From @tsee

On 02/29/2012 03​:26 PM, Ricardo Signes wrote​:

* Zefram [2012-02-29T06​:40​:12]

Not quite the right criterion. We *did* know that this change would break
some proportion of CPAN, and that a full-CPAN smoke test would be useful.
This is not the case for most core changes, contentious or otherwise.
We could (and I won't dispute that we should) have run the full-CPAN
smoke test with the change parked on a branch, rather than putting it
into blead first.

Well, we *did* run it through a CPAN smoke. The problem was not looking at
the list of affected dists, noting which were dependencies for other
libraries (especially significant trees), fixing those, and then re-smoking.

The CPAN smoke report has this data. In all fairness, it doesn't scream
at you about it. :)

* Zefram [2012-02-29T06​:40​:12]

What would have made a difference here, and in similar situations, is an
easy way to invoke the full-CPAN smoke test. We have smoke-me branches
for testing a change across architectures and build options; I'd like to
see a cpan-smoke-me mechanism for testing a change across CPAN distros.

I agree wholeheartedly. It's a lot of work to make this happen, but it would
be phenomenally useful, even if it was limited to one architecture and build.
Especially if the mechanism was easy to re-use as more computing resources
became available.

I think I'd estimate this automation to be two full days of work to get
something hecked up. AFTER understanding what's there. I'm not going to
do it. And this all doesn't include the rabbit whole of understanding
and working with the issues of properly cleaning up after the smokes,
dealing with limited CPU time, dealing with limited scratch disk, etc.

Doesn't take a rocket scientist, but a fair bit of toolchain clue,
persistence and access to the system in question.

* Zefram [2012-02-29T06​:40​:12]

Overall, I don't think we totally bungled this, as Andreas surmised.
We anticipated pain, and we took steps to measure and manage that pain,
albeit imperfectly. It's a could-do-better.

This is my feeling, too. I made a judgment call, and in hindsight, I would
have made it differently. Frustratingly, I believe I had all the information
I needed to make the right one, and simply didn't put it all together at the
time.

But I don't plan to fall on my sword over this. I just plan to keep it in
mind at similar junctures in the future.

Agreed.

--Steffen

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p5pRT commented Feb 29, 2012

From @tsee

On 02/29/2012 12​:11 PM, Chris Prather wrote​:

You yourself have pointed out in other threads that even *doc* changes
can affect things like diagnostics.pm. Going down this road leads to a
place where we'll get lost in the intractable problems which is why I
wanted to cut it off early. I would love to have an infrastructure
where we could smoke every commit against all of CPAN. The things we
could do with such a tool would be amazing! Sadly we're not there yet.

It takes a Google-alike infrastructure to do that. Not just a couple of
machines.

So no, not going to get there. It'll need a bit of a judgement call.

Also, we'd not only want to smoke each commit against its predecessor,
but possibly also across wider ranges. Ouch. Combinatorial hell. :)

--Steffen

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p5pRT commented Feb 29, 2012

From @doy

On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 09​:41​:40PM +0100, Steffen Mueller wrote​:

On 02/29/2012 03​:26 PM, Ricardo Signes wrote​:

* Zefram [2012-02-29T06​:40​:12]

What would have made a difference here, and in similar situations, is an
easy way to invoke the full-CPAN smoke test. We have smoke-me branches
for testing a change across architectures and build options; I'd like to
see a cpan-smoke-me mechanism for testing a change across CPAN distros.

I agree wholeheartedly. It's a lot of work to make this happen, but it would
be phenomenally useful, even if it was limited to one architecture and build.
Especially if the mechanism was easy to re-use as more computing resources
became available.

I think I'd estimate this automation to be two full days of work to
get something hecked up. AFTER understanding what's there. I'm not
going to do it. And this all doesn't include the rabbit whole of
understanding and working with the issues of properly cleaning up
after the smokes, dealing with limited CPU time, dealing with
limited scratch disk, etc.

Doesn't take a rocket scientist, but a fair bit of toolchain clue,
persistence and access to the system in question.

How much effort would it be to set this up on another machine? How much
resources does it take?

-doy

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p5pRT commented Feb 29, 2012

From @tsee

On 02/29/2012 09​:44 PM, Jesse Luehrs wrote​:

On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 09​:41​:40PM +0100, Steffen Mueller wrote​:

On 02/29/2012 03​:26 PM, Ricardo Signes wrote​:

* Zefram [2012-02-29T06​:40​:12]

What would have made a difference here, and in similar situations, is an
easy way to invoke the full-CPAN smoke test. We have smoke-me branches
for testing a change across architectures and build options; I'd like to
see a cpan-smoke-me mechanism for testing a change across CPAN distros.

I agree wholeheartedly. It's a lot of work to make this happen, but it would
be phenomenally useful, even if it was limited to one architecture and build.
Especially if the mechanism was easy to re-use as more computing resources
became available.

I think I'd estimate this automation to be two full days of work to
get something hecked up. AFTER understanding what's there. I'm not
going to do it. And this all doesn't include the rabbit whole of
understanding and working with the issues of properly cleaning up
after the smokes, dealing with limited CPU time, dealing with
limited scratch disk, etc.

Doesn't take a rocket scientist, but a fair bit of toolchain clue,
persistence and access to the system in question.

How much effort would it be to set this up on another machine? How much
resources does it take?

Effort​: It's a bit fiddly, but I'd say setting up another takes no more
than a couple of hours once you got the idea. Making a single smoke span
across multiple machines (if you don't want to smoke multiple commits
separately)? Lots of effort in getting identical machines and quite some
engineering effort to make the logic work. But at least the latter is fun.

CPU? However much you can throw at it. Disk? Proportional to how much
CPUs we have, since there's a fair bit of useless re-smoking that could
be optimized in the underlying tools. I didn't have time and clue to do
that, though.

The current CPAN smoker runs for a couple of days (not quite a week,
IIRC). It's running on a 100GB NFS share, taking a guesstimate of 2/3 of
that for the active smoke. No, it's not disk-space efficient. The
machine is a "Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5420 @​ 2.50GHz", which is a
quad-core-eight-thread single-socket system. RAM is not an issue, but
this one has 32GB. Disk cache probably helps a fair bit. So this isn't
top of the line, but neither your mum's virtual server.

This all being said, I'm perfectly willing to spend some time with you
to get you started in improving my Jenga of hacks AS WELL AS giving
hints about the practical setup. I believe you already have commit
priviledges, so you can log in to "llama" from camel or dromedary. I
think we (p5p) have more machines available for use by smokers. But for
maximum benefit, that'll require some thought in scaling beyond the one.

Cheers,
Steffen

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p5pRT commented Feb 29, 2012

From @tsee

On 02/29/2012 09​:44 PM, Jesse Luehrs wrote​:

I think I'd estimate this automation to be two full days of work to
get something hecked up. AFTER understanding what's there. I'm not
going to do it. And this all doesn't include the rabbit whole of
understanding and working with the issues of properly cleaning up
after the smokes, dealing with limited CPU time, dealing with
limited scratch disk, etc.

Doesn't take a rocket scientist, but a fair bit of toolchain clue,
persistence and access to the system in question.

How much effort would it be to set this up on another machine? How much
resources does it take?

Rats, forgot the link​:

https://github.com/tsee/cpan_perl_branch_smoke

--Steffen

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p5pRT commented Mar 1, 2012

From nick@nickandperla.net

On Wed, 29 Feb 2012 11​:27​:46 +0000
Nicholas Clark <nick@​ccl4.org> wrote​:

On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 06​:11​:49AM -0500, Chris Prather wrote​:

On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 5​:57 AM, Nicholas Clark <nick@​ccl4.org>
wrote​:

[ignoring all other details, one point below]

[ditto]

Putting it in a smoke-me branch would not have helped. That tests
building the core with different configurations on different
platforms.

All tests passed for all core modules. That's all it can tell.

The thing that *would* have got it is a "build all of CPAN",
which we don't have the resources to do for every change. So it
gets down to - how do we spot which changes need that sort of
thing?

If it's not clear from context, I meant "smoke-me" as a substitute
for 'Enhanced Smoking Techniques' we can apply to a branch. It's my
fault for mis-using a term in an imprecise fashion.

It wasn't clear. I think that's obvious in hindsight :-)

smoke-me specifically means platform testing from branches of
git​://perl5.git.perl.org/perl.git
BBC specifically means "Bleadperl Breaks CPAN" - Andreas' testing
setup for trying to build CPAN against a current(ish) build, and then
(*very* usefully) trying to bisect down to the particular commit that
broke things (which I think is only on x86_64 Linux, but I might be
wrong)

keep those terms for those things.

everything else doesn't exist yet.

Should then *all* changes go through a smoke-me change? I treat
all of

I'd actually be happy if (nearly) all non-doc changes *did*. But
it wouldn't have caught this one.

(We'd need to improve the smoke-me reporting infrastructure to
make this useful though)

You yourself have pointed out in other threads that even *doc*
changes can affect things like diagnostics.pm. Going down this road
leads to a

Sure, but they are not platform or configuration dependent.
If people run the tests before they commit, such problems are spotted
early. (Otherwise Jenkins will waggle a finger at them in public. The
shame...)

place where we'll get lost in the intractable problems which is why
I wanted to cut it off early. I would love to have an infrastructure
where we could smoke every commit against all of CPAN. The things we
could do with such a tool would be amazing! Sadly we're not there
yet.

Which I think means that it's not as bad as that.

I think the key thing that was missing here was realising that
this change broke the CPAN smokers *reporting* setup. Which would
have cut off reports, and hence hidden the problems.

Having a failure mode that hides the complexity of the problem is a
double whammy. Having a process to define where we need more
canaries would be useful too.

Regular automated smoke testing to be sure that the reporting
setup isn't broken seems like the first thing to fix. Unlike "all
of CPAN", doing that on a fast cycle seems tractable.

I'm certainly willing to help figure out how to make it happen.

That would be cool. I don't really think that I have the time to do
more than this brain dump​:

It (first) struck me as something that could be automated with
Jenkins. But I'm not *sure*. Does

a) Jenkins maintain state?
b) does it have a concept of a skip?

In that, we need to avoid spamming with false positives. What *we*
here are interested in is whether a change to blead broke the
reporter modules. We don't want to confuse that with the modules
themselves breaking. And it's not *that* easy to control the local
CPAN mirror updates. So, probably one wants to do this​:

0) snapshot CPAN. (eg, private local copy of CPAN, updated by this
build script)
1) build blead with *parent of current commit* (5 minutes on fast
hardware in parallel)
2) build reporter toolchain
a) if it fails at this point, bail out as a "skip". (Warn about
this?) b) otherwise continue
3) clean everything
4) build blead with current commit
5) build reporter toolchain (identical CPAN)

and that's then "pass" or "fail",
and conclusively did *this* blead commit break things

(for the tested platform, which likely is the easy 90% to get right
for starters)

I also wonder whether anyone at the QA hackathon currently
projectless would find this one interesting.

Color me interest-piqued. I am not familiar enough with the entire
toolchain but with a mentor, I could probably spend some time hacking
on this.

Nicholas Clark

--

Nicholas Perez
XMPP/Email​: nick@​nickandperla.net
https://metacpan.org/author/NPEREZ
http​://github.com/nperez

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p5pRT commented Mar 26, 2012

From @nwc10

On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 10​:46​:43AM -0500, George Greer wrote​:

On Wed, 29 Feb 2012, Nicholas Clark wrote​:

The thing that *would* have got it is a "build all of CPAN", which we don't
have the resources to do for every change. So it gets down to - how do we
spot which changes need that sort of thing?

If I can get a copy of the "build all of CPAN" script that the comparisons
from a while ago were done with, I can try to set it up on a rolling
basis. That is, it would compare blead from the last pass with whatever
was blead at the start of the next pass. So it wouldn't be every change
but it would at least be more than never.

I think you'd need to ask Steffen where that is

Should then *all* changes go through a smoke-me change? I treat all of

I'd actually be happy if (nearly) all non-doc changes *did*. But it wouldn't
have caught this one.

(We'd need to improve the smoke-me reporting infrastructure to make this
useful though)

What's on your wishlist?

I fear that this isn't complete, as I think I've forgotten something.

It's partly that (as best I can tell) the code you're running locally has
diverged from the "upstream" code, so it's unclear whether bugs fixes and
other improvements are getting made in more than one place, which is a
duplication of effort.

In particular, I'd like everyone else to run your code, because of a couple of
minor things​:

* the subject using the branch name is terser
  Smoke [blead] v5.15.9-20-g15d94df
  vs the tautological
  Smoke [5.15.9] v5.15.9-20-g15d94df
  Also those 1 or 2 characters can make a difference when the most important
  bit is actually the detail of PASS(...) or FAIL(...), which can fall off the
  right

* the smoke-me code mails me directly if the branch fails
* I can get the logs

but also I'd like a couple of visibility bugs in your setup to be fixed​:

X X O X X X O X -Uusenm -Duseithreads -Dmad
| | | | | +- LC_ALL = en_US.utf8 -DDEBUGGING
| | | | +--- PERLIO = perlio -DDEBUGGING
| | | +----- PERLIO = stdio -DDEBUGGING
| | +------- LC_ALL = en_US.utf8
| +--------- PERLIO = perlio
+----------- PERLIO = stdio

8 results vs 6 annotations, or 4 results vs 2 annotations​:

O F F F
O F F F -Duseithreads
| +--------- -DDEBUGGING
+----------- no debugging

after which I guess that there are more general skimming issues with the
smoke output. I'm familiar with it, and I find it easy to read, but others
are not paying attention to the smoke output because they perceive it as
impenetrable noise. It would be useful force those people to explain what
they find most obnoxious about it, fix that, iterate until they run out of
complaints.

First off, I'm not sure whether the line "Summary​: PASS" (or FAIL...) should
be the first line, with 2 (or 3) blank lines beneath it. But I'm not the
target for such improvements - really the monthly release managers are the
people whose input we should be getting.

Nicholas Clark

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p5pRT commented Mar 26, 2012

From @nwc10

On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 05​:12​:55PM +0100, Nicholas Clark wrote​:

On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 10​:46​:43AM -0500, George Greer wrote​:

On Wed, 29 Feb 2012, Nicholas Clark wrote​:

The thing that *would* have got it is a "build all of CPAN", which we don't
have the resources to do for every change. So it gets down to - how do we
spot which changes need that sort of thing?

If I can get a copy of the "build all of CPAN" script that the comparisons
from a while ago were done with, I can try to set it up on a rolling
basis. That is, it would compare blead from the last pass with whatever
was blead at the start of the next pass. So it wouldn't be every change
but it would at least be more than never.

I think you'd need to ask Steffen where that is

Oops, I don't have an alias for Steffen as "steffen". Correct cc now there.

Clearly "spell checker" is not the only check I need before hitting "send"

Nicholas Clark

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p5pRT commented Mar 26, 2012

From @nwc10

On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 09​:26​:37AM -0500, Ricardo Signes wrote​:

As I said much earlier, I thought we'd be able to revert the change if we
determined it was a bigger problem than we'd expected. Now I'm concerned
that this is not true, because somehow this got propagated as a way to fix
the problem​:

$pattern .= $Carp​::VERSION gt "1.24" ? "." :"";

...which means that a reversion in 1.30 would require all the libraries that
were fixed in this way to be fixed *again*!

Sigh.

Yes, encoding a new golden result is the short-term easiest fix.
But it's not a *good* idea.

* Zefram [2012-02-29T06​:40​:12]

Overall, I don't think we totally bungled this, as Andreas surmised.
We anticipated pain, and we took steps to measure and manage that pain,
albeit imperfectly. It's a could-do-better.

This is my feeling, too. I made a judgment call, and in hindsight, I would
have made it differently. Frustratingly, I believe I had all the information
I needed to make the right one, and simply didn't put it all together at the
time.

But I don't plan to fall on my sword over this. I just plan to keep it in
mind at similar junctures in the future.

Including being in-your-face clear about what the right and wrong way to
fix problems is, so that our path to reversing changes is clear and up front
and if people are, um, *still* unwise enough to ignore it, "your problem"?

It can be really quite frustrating how our maneuverability can be thwarted
by poor decisions of CPAN code. I'm sticking to "poor" because it *should*
be apparent to anyone with time to think, the implications of such a
choice.

Nicholas Clark

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p5pRT commented Mar 26, 2012

From @tsee

On 03/26/2012 06​:15 PM, Nicholas Clark wrote​:

On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 05​:12​:55PM +0100, Nicholas Clark wrote​:

On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 10​:46​:43AM -0500, George Greer wrote​:

On Wed, 29 Feb 2012, Nicholas Clark wrote​:

The thing that *would* have got it is a "build all of CPAN", which we don't
have the resources to do for every change. So it gets down to - how do we
spot which changes need that sort of thing?

If I can get a copy of the "build all of CPAN" script that the comparisons
from a while ago were done with, I can try to set it up on a rolling
basis. That is, it would compare blead from the last pass with whatever
was blead at the start of the next pass. So it wouldn't be every change
but it would at least be more than never.

I think you'd need to ask Steffen where that is

Oops, I don't have an alias for Steffen as "steffen". Correct cc now there.

Clearly "spell checker" is not the only check I need before hitting "send"

It's here​:

https://github.com/tsee/cpan_perl_branch_smoke

The README should mostly have step-by-step instructions. There's a whole
bunch of gotchas such as requiring a fair amount of disk (in particular
when running multiple processes for each commit). The other one is that
the tempdir setting seems to be ignored by CPANPLUS. Whether that's due
to CPANPLUS or the surrounding script I did not bother to find out. I
just used TMPDIR=/foo/bar when kicking off the actual smokers. ...

Let me know if you have questions.

Best regards,
Steffen

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p5pRT commented Mar 26, 2012

From @doy

On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 05​:12​:55PM +0100, Nicholas Clark wrote​:

Also those 1 or 2 characters can make a difference when the most important
bit is actually the detail of PASS(...) or FAIL(...), which can fall off the
right

Then wouldn't it be even more useful to have the PASS(...)/FAIL(...) bit
first?

-doy

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p5pRT commented Mar 26, 2012

From @Tux

On Mon, 26 Mar 2012 17​:12​:55 +0100, Nicholas Clark <nick@​ccl4.org>
wrote​:

On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 10​:46​:43AM -0500, George Greer wrote​:

On Wed, 29 Feb 2012, Nicholas Clark wrote​:

The thing that *would* have got it is a "build all of CPAN", which we don't
have the resources to do for every change. So it gets down to - how do we
spot which changes need that sort of thing?

If I can get a copy of the "build all of CPAN" script that the comparisons
from a while ago were done with, I can try to set it up on a rolling
basis. That is, it would compare blead from the last pass with whatever
was blead at the start of the next pass. So it wouldn't be every change
but it would at least be more than never.

I think you'd need to ask Steffen where that is

Should then *all* changes go through a smoke-me change? I treat all of

I'd actually be happy if (nearly) all non-doc changes *did*. But it wouldn't
have caught this one.

(We'd need to improve the smoke-me reporting infrastructure to make this
useful though)

What's on your wishlist?

I fear that this isn't complete, as I think I've forgotten something.

It's partly that (as best I can tell) the code you're running locally has
diverged from the "upstream" code, so it's unclear whether bugs fixes and
other improvements are getting made in more than one place, which is a
duplication of effort.

In particular, I'd like everyone else to run your code, because of a couple of
minor things​:

* the subject using the branch name is terser
Smoke [blead] v5.15.9-20-g15d94df
vs the tautological
Smoke [5.15.9] v5.15.9-20-g15d94df
Also those 1 or 2 characters can make a difference when the most important
bit is actually the detail of PASS(...) or FAIL(...), which can fall off the
right

We can change that (too)

* the smoke-me code mails me directly if the branch fails

That might be amongst several new options

* I can get the logs

That will probably be possible too in the new setup. The QAH is just a
few days away

--
H.Merijn Brand http​://tux.nl Perl Monger http​://amsterdam.pm.org/
using perl5.00307 .. 5.14 porting perl5 on HP-UX, AIX, and openSUSE
http​://mirrors.develooper.com/hpux/ http​://www.test-smoke.org/
http​://qa.perl.org http​://www.goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/

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p5pRT commented Mar 26, 2012

From @nwc10

On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 11​:39​:52AM -0500, Jesse Luehrs wrote​:

On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 05​:12​:55PM +0100, Nicholas Clark wrote​:

Also those 1 or 2 characters can make a difference when the most important
bit is actually the detail of PASS(...) or FAIL(...), which can fall off the
right

Then wouldn't it be even more useful to have the PASS(...)/FAIL(...) bit
first?

I thought about that, but forgot to say that that makes it hard to sort by
subject in a mail client to get all results for the same platform together.
Right now, sorting by subject is a fast way to determine when a platform
started to fail (or pass)

Nicholas Clark

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p5pRT commented Mar 26, 2012

From @nwc10

On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 06​:52​:12PM +0200, H.Merijn Brand wrote​:

On Mon, 26 Mar 2012 17​:12​:55 +0100, Nicholas Clark <nick@​ccl4.org>
wrote​:

* the subject using the branch name is terser
Smoke [blead] v5.15.9-20-g15d94df
vs the tautological
Smoke [5.15.9] v5.15.9-20-g15d94df
Also those 1 or 2 characters can make a difference when the most important
bit is actually the detail of PASS(...) or FAIL(...), which can fall off the
right

We can change that (too)

* the smoke-me code mails me directly if the branch fails

That might be amongst several new options

* I can get the logs

That will probably be possible too in the new setup. The QAH is just a
few days away

This would all be cool.
It's just is (probably) faster to integrate his code than re-implement it.

Its your valuable Parisian drinking time I care for. Honest :-)

Nicholas Clark

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p5pRT commented Apr 5, 2012

From @greerga

(due to an ADSL outage this is copy/pasted from the web archives)

On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 10​:46​:43AM -0500, George Greer wrote​:

What's on your wishlist?

I fear that this isn't complete, as I think I've forgotten something.

It's partly that (as best I can tell) the code you're running locally
has diverged from the "upstream" code, so it's unclear whether bugs
fixes and other improvements are getting made in more than one place,
which is a duplication of effort.

My Test​::Smoke customizations are​:

1. Run 'make minitest' in addition to other tests. (Although I never did
  investigate how to get the report matrix to add that as a column...)

2. I moved the "user_note" to the very top of the reports instead of the
  bottom. (Currently used for URL to reports but also soon a disclaimer
  about my Win32 VM's propensity to have timing issues.)

3. Also allow ".config" suffix on configurations. (Previously "_config".)

4. Get version (what is between the brackets in smoke email subject line)
  from $ENV{TEST_SMOKE_BRANCH}, if present, instead of repeating Perl
  version. (This is what makes the "Smoke [blead]" in my reports.)

In particular, I'd like everyone else to run your code, because of a
couple of minor things​:

* the subject using the branch name is terser
Smoke [blead] v5.15.9-20-g15d94df
vs the tautological
Smoke [5.15.9] v5.15.9-20-g15d94df
Also those 1 or 2 characters can make a difference when the most
important bit is actually the detail of PASS(...) or FAIL(...),
which can fall off the right

I thought that was rather silly too. I didn't add that to Test​::Smoke
in the best way though (via parsing ".patch") since my "smoke-me" script
already adds the branch name as an environment variable and so that was
fastest for tuit use.

* the smoke-me code mails me directly if the branch fails

That's a function of the 'smoke-me' script, not Test​::Smoke, although I
agree it is a necessity for a 'smoke-me' service to do so. It's an
unconditional email though, not just failures.

My configuration for that is​:

driver/smoke-me_clang_quick.config.template​:
  'to' => 'smokers-reports@​perl.org,%COMMITTER_EMAIL%',

and the 'smoke-me' script does some variable replacements before making
the .config file for Test​::Smoke.

(For those who may not know, the smoke-me script​:
  https://github.com/greerga/smoke-me/
)

* I can get the logs

True, that's necessary for any 'smoke-me' service, Although the dashboard
Tony Cook has is even better. (http​://perl.develop-help.com/reports/)

I wonder if he has that on github...

but also I'd like a couple of visibility bugs in your setup to be fixed​:

X X O X X X O X -Uusenm -Duseithreads -Dmad
| | | | | +- LC_ALL = en_US.utf8 -DDEBUGGING
| | | | +--- PERLIO = perlio -DDEBUGGING
| | | +----- PERLIO = stdio -DDEBUGGING
| | +------- LC_ALL = en_US.utf8
| +--------- PERLIO = perlio
+----------- PERLIO = stdio

8 results vs 6 annotations, or 4 results vs 2 annotations​:

O F F F
O F F F -Duseithreads
| +--------- -DDEBUGGING
+----------- no debugging

Yes, my adding 'minitest' to all runs did that. I do need to fix that.

after which I guess that there are more general skimming issues with the
smoke output. I'm familiar with it, and I find it easy to read, but
others are not paying attention to the smoke output because they
perceive it as impenetrable noise. It would be useful force those people
to explain what they find most obnoxious about it, fix that, iterate
until they run out of complaints.

I agree. My biggest wishlist for Test​::Smoke is (automatically) keeping
track of when a test first started failing so it can differentiate between
"failure" and "known failure", and while we're at it "sporadic failure"
would be nice. I find the Test​::Smoke code...dense...but then I've mostly
only had time for drive-by changes to it and not been able to sit down and
follow its flow.

First off, I'm not sure whether the line "Summary​: PASS" (or FAIL...)
should be the first line, with 2 (or 3) blank lines beneath it. But I'm
not the target for such improvements - really the monthly release
managers are the people whose input we should be getting.

There was a paucity of replies to this particular thread so we may never
know.

--
George Greer

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p5pRT commented Apr 5, 2012

From @Tux

On Wed, 4 Apr 2012 21​:02​:07 -0400 (EDT), George Greer
<perl@​greerga.m-l.org> wrote​:

(due to an ADSL outage this is copy/pasted from the web archives)

On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 10​:46​:43AM -0500, George Greer wrote​:

What's on your wishlist?

I fear that this isn't complete, as I think I've forgotten something.

It's partly that (as best I can tell) the code you're running locally
has diverged from the "upstream" code, so it's unclear whether bugs
fixes and other improvements are getting made in more than one place,
which is a duplication of effort.

My Test​::Smoke customizations are​:

1. Run 'make minitest' in addition to other tests.

If others find that useful too, we should make that optional.

(Although I never did investigate how to get the report matrix to add
that as a column...)

That should have been solved in the new setup

2. I moved the "user_note" to the very top of the reports instead of the
bottom. (Currently used for URL to reports but also soon a disclaimer
about my Win32 VM's propensity to have timing issues.)

That is in a template in the new version, moving it to other places is
easy, but maybe not even necessary in the new database face. Our aim is
to not send reports to a list at all (you can still send mail to
yourself to get a copy).

3. Also allow ".config" suffix on configurations. (Previously "_config".)

Abe?

4. Get version (what is between the brackets in smoke email subject line)
from $ENV{TEST_SMOKE_BRANCH}, if present, instead of repeating Perl
version. (This is what makes the "Smoke [blead]" in my reports.)

As no mails will be send, this is moot

In particular, I'd like everyone else to run your code, because of a
couple of minor things​:

* the subject using the branch name is terser
Smoke [blead] v5.15.9-20-g15d94df
vs the tautological
Smoke [5.15.9] v5.15.9-20-g15d94df
Also those 1 or 2 characters can make a difference when the most
important bit is actually the detail of PASS(...) or FAIL(...),
which can fall off the right

I thought that was rather silly too. I didn't add that to Test​::Smoke
in the best way though (via parsing ".patch") since my "smoke-me" script
already adds the branch name as an environment variable and so that was
fastest for tuit use.

* the smoke-me code mails me directly if the branch fails

That's a function of the 'smoke-me' script, not Test​::Smoke, although I
agree it is a necessity for a 'smoke-me' service to do so. It's an
unconditional email though, not just failures.

My configuration for that is​:

driver/smoke-me_clang_quick.config.template​:
'to' => 'smokers-reports@​perl.org,%COMMITTER_EMAIL%',

and the 'smoke-me' script does some variable replacements before making
the .config file for Test​::Smoke.

(For those who may not know, the smoke-me script​:
https://github.com/greerga/smoke-me/
)

* I can get the logs

In the new setup, logs are being sent to the database is the final
status was not "PASS". This is configurable.

True, that's necessary for any 'smoke-me' service, Although the dashboard
Tony Cook has is even better. (http​://perl.develop-help.com/reports/)

I wonder if he has that on github...

but also I'd like a couple of visibility bugs in your setup to be fixed​:

X X O X X X O X -Uusenm -Duseithreads -Dmad
| | | | | +- LC_ALL = en_US.utf8 -DDEBUGGING
| | | | +--- PERLIO = perlio -DDEBUGGING
| | | +----- PERLIO = stdio -DDEBUGGING
| | +------- LC_ALL = en_US.utf8
| +--------- PERLIO = perlio
+----------- PERLIO = stdio

8 results vs 6 annotations, or 4 results vs 2 annotations​:

O F F F
O F F F -Duseithreads
| +--------- -DDEBUGGING
+----------- no debugging

Yes, my adding 'minitest' to all runs did that. I do need to fix that.

after which I guess that there are more general skimming issues with the
smoke output. I'm familiar with it, and I find it easy to read, but
others are not paying attention to the smoke output because they
perceive it as impenetrable noise. It would be useful force those people
to explain what they find most obnoxious about it, fix that, iterate
until they run out of complaints.

I agree. My biggest wishlist for Test​::Smoke is (automatically) keeping
track of when a test first started failing so it can differentiate between

The new setup registers start time of every smoke-configuration subset
and the duration thereof

"failure" and "known failure", and while we're at it "sporadic failure"
would be nice. I find the Test​::Smoke code...dense...but then I've mostly

Sporadic failures should now be detectable, as we store failures per
test file, so you could make a trendline for e.g. op/read.t

only had time for drive-by changes to it and not been able to sit down and
follow its flow.

First off, I'm not sure whether the line "Summary​: PASS" (or FAIL...)
should be the first line, with 2 (or 3) blank lines beneath it. But I'm
not the target for such improvements - really the monthly release
managers are the people whose input we should be getting.

There was a paucity of replies to this particular thread so we may never
know.

We will be on #smoke in irc.perl.org to discuss wishes (when possible)

--
H.Merijn Brand http​://tux.nl Perl Monger http​://amsterdam.pm.org/
using perl5.00307 .. 5.14 porting perl5 on HP-UX, AIX, and openSUSE
http​://mirrors.develooper.com/hpux/ http​://www.test-smoke.org/
http​://qa.perl.org http​://www.goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/

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p5pRT commented Apr 5, 2012

From @nwc10

On Thu, Apr 05, 2012 at 09​:38​:15AM +0200, H.Merijn Brand wrote​:

On Wed, 4 Apr 2012 21​:02​:07 -0400 (EDT), George Greer
<perl@​greerga.m-l.org> wrote​:

(due to an ADSL outage this is copy/pasted from the web archives)

On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 10​:46​:43AM -0500, George Greer wrote​:

What's on your wishlist?

I fear that this isn't complete, as I think I've forgotten something.

It's partly that (as best I can tell) the code you're running locally
has diverged from the "upstream" code, so it's unclear whether bugs
fixes and other improvements are getting made in more than one place,
which is a duplication of effort.

My Test​::Smoke customizations are​:

1. Run 'make minitest' in addition to other tests.

If others find that useful too, we should make that optional.

Well, I find it useful that at least one smoker is running it.
I don't know what the right way to customise it is.

(Although I never did investigate how to get the report matrix to add
that as a column...)

3. Also allow ".config" suffix on configurations. (Previously "_config".)

Abe?

4. Get version (what is between the brackets in smoke email subject line)
from $ENV{TEST_SMOKE_BRANCH}, if present, instead of repeating Perl
version. (This is what makes the "Smoke [blead]" in my reports.)

As no mails will be send, this is moot

Not totally. I'd still like to be getting mails for my failed smoke-me
branches, and it's nicer with the branch name. Also, I'm not *sure* if I'd
prefer to also opt-in to get e-mail for failures on blead (or any branch
tested) if it was my fault - ie approximated by "the head commit was me", in
which case it's also useful for it. But that's starting to sound more complex
than just "convention is that smoke-me smokers notify on failure" with the
opt-out being "well, don't create a smoke-me branch then"

* I can get the logs

In the new setup, logs are being sent to the database is the final
status was not "PASS". This is configurable.

oooh. nice.

True, that's necessary for any 'smoke-me' service, Although the dashboard
Tony Cook has is even better. (http​://perl.develop-help.com/reports/)

I wonder if he has that on github...

Good question.

but also I'd like a couple of visibility bugs in your setup to be fixed​:

X X O X X X O X -Uusenm -Duseithreads -Dmad
| | | | | +- LC_ALL = en_US.utf8 -DDEBUGGING
| | | | +--- PERLIO = perlio -DDEBUGGING
| | | +----- PERLIO = stdio -DDEBUGGING
| | +------- LC_ALL = en_US.utf8
| +--------- PERLIO = perlio
+----------- PERLIO = stdio

8 results vs 6 annotations, or 4 results vs 2 annotations​:

O F F F
O F F F -Duseithreads
| +--------- -DDEBUGGING
+----------- no debugging

Yes, my adding 'minitest' to all runs did that. I do need to fix that.

Yes, please magically find time to fix it :-)

Although it might be better to spend that same time migrating to the new
Test​::Smoke code, if it makes it easier to add custom columns.

after which I guess that there are more general skimming issues with the
smoke output. I'm familiar with it, and I find it easy to read, but
others are not paying attention to the smoke output because they
perceive it as impenetrable noise. It would be useful force those people
to explain what they find most obnoxious about it, fix that, iterate
until they run out of complaints.

I agree. My biggest wishlist for Test​::Smoke is (automatically) keeping
track of when a test first started failing so it can differentiate between

The new setup registers start time of every smoke-configuration subset
and the duration thereof

"failure" and "known failure", and while we're at it "sporadic failure"
would be nice. I find the Test​::Smoke code...dense...but then I've mostly

Sporadic failures should now be detectable, as we store failures per
test file, so you could make a trendline for e.g. op/read.t

Nice

First off, I'm not sure whether the line "Summary​: PASS" (or FAIL...)
should be the first line, with 2 (or 3) blank lines beneath it. But I'm
not the target for such improvements - really the monthly release
managers are the people whose input we should be getting.

There was a paucity of replies to this particular thread so we may never
know.

We will be on #smoke in irc.perl.org to discuss wishes (when possible)

I suspect we (also)(for some value of we) need to be more systematic in
asking monthly release managers what confused them in the smoke reports.

Easiest way to make that happen seems to be to make a question about smoke
reports a regular fixture on the Onionsketch agenda.

Nicholas Clark

@p5pRT
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p5pRT commented Apr 13, 2012

From @greerga

On Thu, 5 Apr 2012, H.Merijn Brand wrote​:

On Wed, 4 Apr 2012 21​:02​:07 -0400 (EDT), George Greer

4. Get version (what is between the brackets in smoke email subject line)
from $ENV{TEST_SMOKE_BRANCH}, if present, instead of repeating Perl
version. (This is what makes the "Smoke [blead]" in my reports.)

As no mails will be send, this is moot

It does keep track of the git branch in the database though, correct?

"failure" and "known failure", and while we're at it "sporadic failure"
would be nice. I find the Test​::Smoke code...dense...but then I've mostly

Sporadic failures should now be detectable, as we store failures per
test file, so you could make a trendline for e.g. op/read.t

Is there functionality to ignore certain tests failing on particular
servers? For example, my Win32 smoker fails various timing tests due to
it being in a VM with a bouncy clock which aren't otherwise interesting.
My Linux smoker though wouldn't have any clock problems (other than tests
that make assumptions about load average).

--
George Greer

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