Re: Bison 3.0 updates

On 07/29/2013 10:28 AM, Marti Raudsepp wrote:
> Hi,
>
>> On 07/29/2013 01:05 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
>>> Buildfarm member anchovy has been failing for the last couple of days,
>>> evidently because its owner just couldn't wait to adopt bison 3.0,
>>> which is all of 3 days old.
> Hmm? Anchovy is upgrading automatically to newest Arch Linux packages daily.
>
> I assumed that's a good thing -- the purpose of build farm is to test
> PostgreSQL in various different real-life environments? Arch Linux is
> one such environment that adopts new packages very quickly. If Arch
> users are unable to build PostgreSQL then surely it's good to be
> notified by the build farm before real users start reporting problems?
>
> I don't mean to sound reluctant, I'm open to suggestions, but please
> help me understand why this is bad.

The buildfarm is principally designed to detect when some change in the
Postgres code breaks something. As such, the expectation is that the
animals will provide a fairly stable platform. A totally moving target
will present us with false positives, since the failure could be due to
no action of ours at all.

A machine that can auto-upgrade anything at any time is really not very
fit for the purpose. What that would be testing is not if a change in
Postgres code has broken something, but if the host packaging system has
broken something.

>> And if the upgrade involves
>> the OS or the compiler, please use the udate_personality.pl script to update
>> the server.
> Is it OK to run update_personality.pl automatically every day from crontab?

No. It is designed to support a fairly small number of changes.

cheers

andrew