bug#63414: Evaluation comparison on cuirass

[Christopher Baines]

Ludovic Courtès <ludo@gnu.org> writes:

> Hello,
>
> Andreas Enge <andreas@enge.fr> skribis:
>
>> When working on a branch and deciding whether to merge it, we need a way
>> of comparing its status with that of the master branch. As far as I can see,
>> there is currently no way in cuirass to compare arbitrary evaluations and
>> get a list (or a dashboard) of builds that fail in one, but not the other.
>
> Going back to this, I agree with Josselin that the Data Service does an
> excellent job at comparing the status of different revisions; I think we
> should leverage that rather than try to implement something similar in
> Cuirass.
>
> Perhaps one thing we can improve though is the information flow from
> Cuirass to the Data Service.  ISTR that Christopher mentioned that the
> Data Service couldn’t easily get information about substitute
> availability from ci.guix, or something like that.

Substitute availability is easy to get, but there's some difficulties
around build information.

> Is there still a problem here, Chris?  If we need a new HTTP endpoint in
> Cuirass to address that, I’m happy to give a hand.

The data service used to poll ci.guix.gnu.org for builds and build
status information, but I stopped that quite a while ago after the data
got messy when the Cuirass database was deleted and recreated. Since the
data service stores and uses the build IDs from Cuirass, it's confusing
when they're reused.

Anyway, even ignoring that, I'm unsure if polling worked well. That's
why I started to look at pushing data from Cuirass to the data
serivce. I did implement that, but the code on the Cuirass side was
never used. It's that same endpoint though that the build coordinator
uses to send build information to the data service (both instances).

The other blocker to making use of Cuirass data in the data service is
making sure it's high quality, in particular that if it says a build has
failed, I at least want to know it's started to build that
derivation. We don't want things showing up on QA as problems when it's
just Cuirass being unable to start builds.

Thanks,

Chris

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