At Last: A BuildBot!

It's taken me nearly two years to get all of the stars in alignment, but I am very excited to announce that we now have a WinCairo build bot up and running. If you look at the WebKit Buildbot, you can find the new entry for it (and it's even currently green!) Better look quick -- who knows how long it will last!

I have not activated any test phases yet, since none of the pixel level tests have been generated, but this will come in time (hint, hint Mr. Martin Robinson...)

The whole process of getting things up and running was a rather arduous process:

• First you have to get your port building from the build-webkit command line.


• Next, you have to set up a Buildbot. You only really need the slave portion, but to test your configuration you will need to set up a local buildbot master.


• Note: Here you will (perhaps) learn that the environment used by the pdevenv utility does not match the build environment you've been using to debug build problems.


• Once you confirm your build works when executed by the buildbot, you need to get a patch landed in the WebKit archive that defines your build slave.


• On the happy day your buildbot configuration lands, you have to start harassing _wms to schedule a restart of the master buildbot.


• Being a great guy, _wms will get a restart scheduled, at which point a veritable avalanche of source changes will be suddenly kicked loose by the commit-queue. The restart will take upwards of 48 hours before things settle down enough for the service to restart.

But eventually, if you persevere, your bot will be live and GREEN. And with this work, comes some wonderful benefits as it will be much easier for the other WebKit folks to avoid breaks. And I can even configure the system to send me an e-mail when my build fails. So cool!

Let's hope that this will usher in a grand new era of clean WinCairo builds and better (and faster) code production!