@@ -33,6 +33,48 @@ help in reproducing, analyzing and fixin
welcome. Don't hesitate to add a comment to bug reports reporting your
findings, even if you don't yet see the full picture.
+Analyzing and fixing autobuild failures
+---------------------------------------
+
+The Buildroot autobuilders are a set of build machines that continuously
+run Buildroot builds based on random configurations. This is done for
+all architectures supported by Buildroot, with various toolchains, and
+with a random selection of packages. With the large commit activity on
+Buildroot, these autobuilders are a great help in detecting problems
+very early after commit.
+
+All build results are available at http://autobuild.buildroot.org[],
+statistics are at http://autobuild.buildroot.org/stats.php[]. Every day,
+an overview of all failed packages is sent to the mailing list.
+
+Detecting problems is great, but obviously these problems have to be
+fixed as well. Your contribution is very welcome here! There are
+basically two things that can be done:
+
+- Analyzing the problems. The daily summary mails do not contain details
+ about the actual failures: in order to see what's going on you have to
+ open the build log and check the last output. Having someone doing
+ this for all packages in the mail is very useful for other developers,
+ as they can make a quick initial analysis based on this output alone.
+
+- Fixing a problem. When fixing autobuild failures, you should follow
+ these steps:
+ . Check if you can reproduce the problem by building with the same
+ configuration.
+ . Analyze the problem and create a fix.
+ . Verify that the problem is really fixed by starting from a clean
+ Buildroot tree and only applying your fix.
+ . Send the fix to the Buildroot mailing list (see
+ xref:submitting-patches[]). In case you created a patch against the
+ package sources, you should also send the patch upstream so that the
+ problem will be fixed in a later release, and the patch in Buildroot
+ can be removed.
+ In the commit message of a patch fixing an autobuild failure, add a
+ reference to the build result directory, as follows:
+---------------------
+Fixes http://autobuild.buildroot.org/results/51000a9d4656afe9e0ea6f07b9f8ed374c2e4069
+---------------------
+
[[submitting-patches]]
Submitting patches
------------------
@@ -210,23 +252,6 @@ Buildroot's Patchwork website can be use
purposes. Please see xref:apply-patches-patchwork[] for more
information on using Buildroot's Patchwork website to apply patches.
-Autobuild
----------
-
-The Buildroot community is currently setting up automatic builds in
-order to test more and more configurations. All build results are
-available at http://autobuild.buildroot.org[]
-
-A good way to contribute is by fixing broken builds.
-
-In the commit message of a patch fixing an _autobuild_, add a
-reference to the _build result directory_ (the +dir+ link in the _data
-column_):
-
----------------------
-Fixes http://autobuild.buildroot.org/results/51000a9d4656afe9e0ea6f07b9f8ed374c2e4069
----------------------
-
[[reporting-bugs]]
Reporting issues/bugs, get help
-------------------------------
This patch moves the section about autobuild fixing up, and expands it with more details about what autobuilds are, and how you can help with it. Signed-off-by: Thomas De Schampheleire <thomas.de.schampheleire@gmail.com> --- docs/manual/contribute.txt | 59 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++------------ 1 files changed, 42 insertions(+), 17 deletions(-)