We do hourly test builds of the bind9 tree.  This is an attempt to
document how they work.


* How things work

The scripts driving the build system are in ~wpk/b9t.  They are not
under CVS control.  The builds are driven by cron jobs separately
installed on each build system, running as user wpk.  Here is a
relevant extract from wpk's crontab on bb.rc.vix.com (reformatted to
fit in 80 columns):

The sources are checked out, and the web reports are generated,
on bb, as driven by the following cron jobs:

    #
    # check out the current bind 9 version and make the source tarball
    #
    45 2-21 * * * PLATFORM=BSD-3.1 && . $HOME/b9t/hosts/$PLATFORM/env && \
        nice make PLATFORM=$PLATFORM -e -f $HOME/b9t/bin/b9t.mk tarsrc \
        > $HOME/b9t/hosts/$PLATFORM/b9t-status 2>&1

    #
    # run the bind 9 build status report generator
    #
    30 3-22 * * * perl $HOME/b9t/bin/b9status.pl \
         > /proj/build-reports/bind9/bind9.html 2> /dev/null


Each host has a separate crontab entry for building the server and
running tests.  Here are examples from bb and sol:

    #
    # build the BSD-3.1 version of bind 9
    #
    0 3-22 * * * $HOME/b9t/bin/b9t.cron BSD-3.1

    #
    # bind 9 build for Solaris 5.6
    #
    0 3-22 * * * $HOME/b9t/bin/b9t.cron SunOS-5.6

Do not confuse the shell script ~wpk/b9t/bin/b9t.cron with the crontab
template (?) ~wpk/b9t/b9t.cron.  Although they have the same name,
they are not related.

The actual builds take place in a directory whose location differs
among systems.  On most of them, it's on a local disk, under /build.
On some, it's on NFS; in this case the location is defined in
~wpk/b9t/hosts/$PLATFORM/env.

To make things more confusing, "sol" also builds an extra
copy of bind9 using gcc, even though it is not shown
on the web pages:

    #
    # bind 8 build for Solaris 5.6-gcc
    #
    30 4,10,16,22 * * * $HOME/b8t/bin/b8t.cron SunOS-5.6-gcc

The output from the various stages is under
/proj/build-reports/bind9/hosts/$(PLATFORM).
To make the files harder to find (?), they have
names starting with a period:

  .populate
  .config
  .build
  .test


* Common problems

Sometime named processes fail to die when the tests are done,
interfering with the next test.  Just kill them.

On hp.rc.vix.com, the tests often fail because of NFS I/O errors.
When this happens, the machine needs to be rebooted.  It will not
come up again without manually entering commands on the console.

On bb, the tests sometimes fail because .nfs* files stuck in the build
tree keep it from being completely deleted when the next test runs.
The .nfs* files cannot be deleted, but they can be moved, so one way
of fixing this is to move them to ~wpk.