Status of Patchwatcher

[Dan Kegel]

Seth Shelnutt wrote:
> I am wondering what that status of patchwatcher is?

It's waiting around for somebody to have time to start it
up again.  It's ugly code, written in shell and perl, which
scares most people off.  One has to wonder whether it
shouldn't be done over again using buildbot, just to avoid
scaring people.  But it could live on in its present form
given time and attention.  Another problem is that the
code for watching for patch series is fragile.  We might
conceivably move to driving it from a web submission form
like WineTestBot uses, that would solve that.

(I've been focusing my precious Wine time on the daily
valgrind runs.  It would be cool to run those tests on
Patchwatcher; that was the whole goal of patchwatcher, actually.
I think to do it fast enough we'd have to take a shortcut,
like only valgrind the tests most obviously related to the change.)

> I saw the ideals for converting UnitTestSuit and wpkg scripts to Appinstall. I
> definitely think this is a good idea and needed; however I was thinking that
> linking patchwatcher and appinstall testing would be even more beneficial.

You're referring to
http://wiki.winehq.org/SummerOfCode#head-6e93309cf25ab1bb55e35698562cac148d873cd1
and http://wiki.winehq.org/UnitTestSuites

A daily run of appinstall is probably sufficient.  Austin does that already.
The main downside is that the results aren't tied in to test.winehq.org.

It'd be really great to invoke lots of wpkg installs from inside Appinstall,
and file bugs for whatever that turns up.  (And fix them, maybe.)

UnitTestSuites is a bit more programmer-oriented.  I'd recommend that
if you're interested in becoming a developer.  Grinding through and
automating builds for a few open source apps on wine would
probably teach you a lot.
- Dan