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On Thu, 15 May 2014 19:14:55 +0200, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis@pitrou.net> wrote:
On Thu, 15 May 2014 09:40:33 -0500 Skip Montanaro <skip@pobox.com> wrote:
On Thu, May 15, 2014 at 9:35 AM, Brett Cannon <bcannon@gmail.com> wrote:
I view stable buildbots as staying up and testing critical platforms.
Would "supported" and "unsupported" (or "critical" and "optional"?) make more sense? "Unstable" suggests "broken" to me, not "we don't really care about these."
I don't know who came up with these names in the first place. However there's a slight nuance here: some platform may be supported, but still some buildbot end up in the "unstable" category if it has issues of its own (for example the machine has a flaky network connection, etc.). And indeed there are Linux and Windows machines in the "unstable" category.
There's also nothing stopping us from putting a "niche platform" buildbot into the stable group if it normally builds fine. I suppose it would be pretty much supported by default then, though, if it being red was a release blocker. But we could decide to ignore a red 'niche' buildbot at release time; so, I think 'stable' vs 'unstable' is indeed the most descriptive: unstable buildbots are the ones that turn red "randomly"[*], or are always red because no one has fixed whatever the problem is (which might be on the buildbot or in our code). --David [*] Yes, our stable platforms do that sometimes too, but those are test instabilities, whereas unstable buildbots fail tests other than the known unstable tests.