emacs/admin/notes/emba

-*- mode: outline; coding: utf-8 -*-

Copyright (C) 2019-2022 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
See the end of the file for license conditions.

NOTES FOR EMACS CONTINUOUS BUILD ON EMBA

A continuous build for Emacs can be found at
<https://emba.gnu.org/emacs/emacs>, a Gitlab instance.  It watches the
Emacs git repository and starts a pipeline (jobset) if there are new
changes.  This happens for all Emacs branches which belong to the
defined workflow (see below).

* Mail notifications

In addition to the web interface, emba can send notifications by email
when a job fails.  It sends notifications about test status to
<emacs-buildstatus@gnu.org>.

If you want to receive these notifications, please subscribe at
<https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/emacs-buildstatus>.

Alternatively, these notifications can be read via gmane at
<nntp+news.gmane.org:gmane.emacs.buildstatus>.

The messages contain a URL to the log file of the failed job, like
<https://emba.gnu.org/emacs/emacs/-/jobs/739/raw>.

* Emacs jobset

The Emacs jobset is defined in the Emacs source tree, file
'.gitlab-ci.yml'.  All related files are located in directory
'test/infra'.  They could be adapted for every Emacs branch, see
<https://emba.gnu.org/help/ci/yaml/README.md>.

Only branches whose name starts with 'master', 'emacs', 'feature', or
'fix' are considered.  This is declared in the workflow rules of file
'test/infra/gitlab-ci.yml'.

A jobset on Gitlab is called a pipeline.  Emacs pipelines run through
the stages 'build-images', 'platform-images' and 'native-comp-images'
(create an Emacs instance by 'make bootstrap' with different
configuration parameters) as well as 'normal', 'platforms' and
'native-comp' (run respective test jobs based on the produced images).

The jobs for stage 'normal' are contained in the file
'test/infra/test-jobs.yml'.  This file is generated by calling 'make
-C test generate-test-jobs' in the Emacs source tree, and the
resulting file should be pushed to the Emacs git repository afterwards.

Every job runs in a Debian docker container.  It uses the local clone
of the Emacs git repository to perform a bootstrap and test of Emacs.
This could happen for several jobs with changed configuration, compile,
and test parameters.

The 'build-image-*' jobs of the different '*-images' stages run only
if there are severe changes in the Emacs sources, like in Makefiles
etc.  Otherwise they are skipped, and the corresponding 'test-*' jobs
run just 'make -C test ...' in the respective Docker image from a
previous build run.

Jobs in the 'build-images' and 'normal' stages are triggered by
changes of respective files in the Emacs git repository.  All other
jobs run scheduled in a pipeline every 8 hours.

The log files for every test job are kept on the server for a week.
They can be downloaded from the server, visiting the URL
<https://emba.gnu.org/emacs/emacs/-/pipelines>, and selecting the job
in question.

Every pipeline generates a JUnit test report for the respective test
jobs, which can be inspected on the pipeline web page.  This test
report counts completed ERT tests, aborted tests are not counted.

* Emba configuration

The emba configuration files are hosted on
<https://gitlab.com/emacs-ci/emba-ansible>.

* Identifying emba

Lisp packages, Makefiles, scripts, and other software could determine
whether they run on emba by checking for the environment variable
EMACS_EMBA_CI.


This file is part of GNU Emacs.

GNU Emacs is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

GNU Emacs is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with GNU Emacs.  If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.