rfc: give koji diff capabilities

[Jesse Keating]

On Mon, 2010-06-21 at 22:20 +1000, David Timms wrote:
> On 21/06/10 09:38, Thomas Spura wrote:
> >> Any comments (other than 'show me the money/code') ?
> >
> > I don't see a benefit of that... When a build fails, it kills all
> > other current builds of other architectures, so you need to check that
> > architecture, that fails first and the diff would not contain the error.
> Hi Thomas, good point. But reality might be different:
> http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=2260035 -> build.log
> 
> The x86_64 build failed, and is says that the i686 was cancelled.
> 
> However, the build.log shows that the package and -debuginfo .rpms were 
> created, ie the build actually succeeded. This seems like a bug in the 
> koji web interface.
> 
> Having the non-failing build be cancelled may not be optimal; I have 
> definitely found it helpful to compare the build logs of different 
> archs, when one succeeds (or at least gets further). It helps to see the 
> diff in log results to understand what is different about the process 
> between each build.
> 
> > Other that that. The diff would show, different which different
> > packages are installed, e.g. gcc.i386 instead of gcc.x86_64, which
> > doesn't interest me either...
> > (And different requires etc.)
> That would be more bonus points for the diff to optionally ignore !
> A decent visual diff will highlight lines that are different, but also 
> show the actual characters that differ (I don't know if viewvc can do that).
> 
> > What would be the benefit of such a feature?
> Resolving build problems more quickly:
> - what changed in the build process from arch to arch ...
> - what changed in the bp from fedora release to fedora release ...
> - what changed in the bp compare to an earlier version-release ...
> 
> However, for the less experienced package maintainers: tell me shortest 
> time for you to determine the cause for the failure in:
> http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/taskinfo?taskID=2260034  -> build.log
> 
> Now, would these screen shots from a visual diff program have reduced 
> the time for working out both the error, and the cause ?
> http://members.iinet.net.au/~timmsy/rakarrack/meld.rakarrack.diff1.png
> http://members.iinet.net.au/~timmsy/rakarrack/meld.rakarrack.diff2.png

Something like this probably belongs in a consumer app, and not in Koji
directly.  You'd find it faster to develop and use something stand alone
that consumed content from koji in order to do the comparisons, and then
you'd have a better way of comparing different builds.

-- 
Jesse Keating
Fedora -- Freedom² is a feature!
identi.ca: http://identi.ca/jkeating
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