Commit f7d5d971 authored by Thomas De Schampheleire's avatar Thomas De Schampheleire Committed by Thomas Petazzoni
Browse files

manual: contributing: move and expand autobuild section 



This patch moves the section about autobuild fixing up, and expands it with
more details about what autobuilds are, and how you can help with it.

Signed-off-by: default avatarThomas De Schampheleire <thomas.de.schampheleire@gmail.com>
Acked-by: default avatarSamuel Martin <s.martin49@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarThomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni@free-electrons.com>
parent 01ab9e6b

docs/manual/contribute.txt

+46 −17
Original line number Diff line number Diff line
@@ -33,6 +33,52 @@ help in reproducing, analyzing and fixing reported bugs is more than 
welcome. Don't hesitate to add a comment to bug reports reporting your

findings, even if you don't yet see the full picture.



Analyzing and fixing autobuild failures

---------------------------------------



The Buildroot autobuilders are a set of build machines that continuously

run Buildroot builds based on random configurations. This is done for

all architectures supported by Buildroot, with various toolchains, and

with a random selection of packages. With the large commit activity on

Buildroot, these autobuilders are a great help in detecting problems

very early after commit.



All build results are available at http://autobuild.buildroot.org[],

statistics are at http://autobuild.buildroot.org/stats.php[]. Every day,

an overview of all failed packages is sent to the mailing list.



Detecting problems is great, but obviously these problems have to be

fixed as well. Your contribution is very welcome here! There are

basically two things that can be done:



- Analyzing the problems. The daily summary mails do not contain details

  about the actual failures: in order to see what's going on you have to

  open the build log and check the last output. Having someone doing

  this for all packages in the mail is very useful for other developers,

  as they can make a quick initial analysis based on this output alone.



- Fixing a problem. When fixing autobuild failures, you should follow

  these steps:

  . Check if you can reproduce the problem by building with the same

    configuration. You can do this manually, or use the

    http://git.buildroot.org/buildroot-test/tree/utils/br-reproduce-build[br-reproduce-build]

    script that will automatically clone a Buildroot git repository,

    checkout the correct revision, download and set the right

    configuration, and start the build.

  . Analyze the problem and create a fix.

  . Verify that the problem is really fixed by starting from a clean

    Buildroot tree and only applying your fix.

  . Send the fix to the Buildroot mailing list (see

    xref:submitting-patches[]). In case you created a patch against the

    package sources, you should also send the patch upstream so that the

    problem will be fixed in a later release, and the patch in Buildroot

    can be removed.

    In the commit message of a patch fixing an autobuild failure, add a

    reference to the build result directory, as follows:

---------------------

Fixes http://autobuild.buildroot.org/results/51000a9d4656afe9e0ea6f07b9f8ed374c2e4069

---------------------



[[submitting-patches]]

Submitting patches

------------------
@@ -210,23 +256,6 @@ Buildroot's Patchwork website can be used to pull in patches for testing 
purposes. Please see xref:apply-patches-patchwork[] for more

information on using Buildroot's Patchwork website to apply patches.



Autobuild

---------



The Buildroot community is currently setting up automatic builds in

order to test more and more configurations. All build results are

available at http://autobuild.buildroot.org[]



A good way to contribute is by fixing broken builds.



In the commit message of a patch fixing an _autobuild_, add a

reference to the _build result directory_ (the +dir+ link in the _data

column_):



---------------------

Fixes http://autobuild.buildroot.org/results/51000a9d4656afe9e0ea6f07b9f8ed374c2e4069

---------------------



[[reporting-bugs]]

Reporting issues/bugs, get help

-------------------------------