[Toybox] GitHub Action Example

[Rob Landley]

On 6/16/20 3:27 PM, enh wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 4:05 PM Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:
>>
>> On 6/15/20 1:42 PM, enh wrote:
>>> On Mon, Jun 15, 2020 at 11:05 AM Rob Landley <rob at landley.net> wrote:
>>>>> i don't actually remember us ever having an aarch64-specific issue.
>>>>> (funnily enough, a 32-bit x86 build would probably find more bugs,
>>>>> since i don't think anyone regularly tests any 32-bit arch locally. i
>>>>> certainly only find 32-bit issues when i try to run on an Android
>>>>> emulator!)
>>>>
>>>> I test it before releases, and I test the j-core stuff which is still only 32
>>>> bit. But it's not tested nearly as regularly as the 64 bit stuff is.
>>>
>>> (to be clear, i meant "at the time of commit". thanks to the 32-bit
>>> x86 "cuttlefish" emulator testing, we do get testing every time i try
>>> to sync AOSP. but .)
>>
>> This wouldn't be at time of commit either, this would be at time of push to
>> github. Which lately has been a day or so after my local commit on my laptop
>> because I forget. :P
> 
> as far as the other ~8 billion people on the planet are concerned,
> that's the same thing :-)

Yes, but 99.99% of them get it through you, then a phone manufacturer, than a
telecom vendor on a collective 18 month delay, and very few of them are the ones
who have to root cause the issue and come up with a patch.

I admit this is probably a thing I should do, if for no other reason than I
haven't got macos test hardware. (Unfortunately, the mac version of a raspberry
pi appears to be $800: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/mac-mini .)

>> Did you know that "lunch" without options does _not_ list sdk-eng? (Which sounds
>> like it's building the sdk and not an aosp image to run under the emulator, but
>> let's at least try what it says first...)
> 
> there are lots of options not listed in there. (and i don't actually
> know a way to see the full list.)

I want to make a FAQ entry with "do this, this, and this, here's what the
results mean". I expect multiple steps to involve "this runs overnight".

The "download" part is: wget repo, repo init blah, repo sync (runs overnight).

The "build" part is: cd $APSP && . build/envsetup.sh && lunch something && make
(runs overnight)

Then on day 3, you type "emulator" (at the envsetuped prompt) which I've never
gotten to actually work for various reasons, most recently it said:

emulator: WARNING: encryption is off
Fontconfig warning: "/etc/fonts/fonts.conf", line 100: unknown element "blank"
queryCoreProfileSupport: swap interval not found
emulator: ERROR: VkCommonOperations.cpp:496: Failed to create Vulkan instance.
E0616 13:12:24.550453924   31310 socket_utils_common_posix.cc:201] check for
SO_REUSEPORT: {"created":"@1592331144.550415611","description":"SO_REUSEPORT
unavailable on compiling
system","file":"/mnt/tmpfs/src/android/emu-master-dev/external/grpc/src/core/lib/iomgr/socket_utils_common_posix.cc","file_line":169}
emulator: ERROR: AdbHostServer.cpp:102: Unable to connect to adb daemon on port:
5037

And then pegged one CPU for an hour without ever drawing anything into the black
rectangle.

But if it DID work then presumably I'd adb shell into it somehow and work out
how to run the test in there?

>> Lovely. This thing really really REALLY cannot count. And at this point it's
>> gonna be eating all 4 processors through dinner.
>>
>> (I'd kill it and restart it with taskset, but I'm not sure how to "make clean"
>> and I am that guy who hits every weird dependency bug from incomplete partial
>> builds pretty much every time...)
> 
> rm -rf out/

Cool. Exactly what I was looking for.

>>> in the Dijkstra sense (page 16 of
>>> http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/brian.randell/NATO/nato1969.PDF), sure.
>>
>> In the "I add tests for the thing I just noticed was broken all the time" sense too.
> 
> i meant to also include a Dawkins "half an eye is better than no eye"
> reference :-)

Is there some phrase to encapsulate "this guy did interesting things when
younger, then ossified into a loon"? Maybe a reference to Isaac Newton's Alchemy
phase or Linus Pauling's "Vitamin C" phase? (Both of which were Waaaaaay before
Bill Joy, Eric Raymond, J.K. Rowling, and Orson Scott Card did their swan dives.
It's sad: I still occasionally want to link to 1990's dilbert comics that
illustrates some point or other really well, but "Current Dude is Way Past His
Sell-By Date" kinda blunts the impact...)

(Yes I know about Death of the Author. It's adjacent, but not _quite_ the same
thing? Sigh, another reason we need humanities departments and not just stem,
"here's what tumblr and tvtropes have to say on this" isn't authoritative.)

>> The qemu stuff is intended to let me automate it so I can run it more easily and
>> often, but it doesn't help with the MacOS stuff because Apple went out of their
>> way to stop MacOS from running under qemu because proprietary and tied to a
>> hardware dongle in a keyboard controller.
> 
> yeah, for my money the "we'll check you can still build on macos"
> alone is worth it, macos being such a pain in the ass to deal with
> otherwise.

Indeed, but that provides regression testing without a development environment.
If it finds a bug on macos, what do I _do_ about it?

(I still have a todo item to dig into that ps library and try to do a
portability.c to fill out at least _some_ of the ps fields, and I can come up
with a freebsd test for that, and in THEORY going from freebsd to macos is like
going from devuan to RHEL. Plenty of breakage but at least related species, and
I've had bsd development environments running under kvm before, and can maybe
poke Ed Maste to help there if I set aside time to work on it... :)

>>>> And 32 bit argument processing has a known structural limitation (the "truncate
>>>> -s 8G" thing) which I've mentioned here before. I know how to fix it, but the
>>>> fix is intrusive enough I'm not sure it's worth doing?
>>>
>>> (i'm much more interested in getting to where we have 64-bit-only,
>>> both to replace the current 64/32 high end and the 32-only low end.)
>>
>> I thought Android already mostly gave up 32 bit support (all those old phones
>> and tablets I can't upgrade past Marshmallow), but the embedded space ain't gonna.
> 
> L was the first 64/32 release. there has yet to be a 64-only release.
> almost all devices today are 64/32, though very low-end stuff like
> Android Go or watches or whatever are still 32-only.

I should look at android go. Is that one of the "lunch" targets? (Unfortunately
googling for "android lunch go" hits the fact you named a programming language
go and wrote half your build system in it.)

> the most recent development is that if you're a 64/32 device, you'll
> get the 64-bit version of an app if the developer has both 64 and 32
> versions (and if you have 32-bit native code, you're now required to
> have the corresponding 64-bit code). but from toybox's perspective,
> 64/32 devices are already 64-only --- there's no 32-bit toybox binary
> lurking there.

The "make root" stuff should automate 32 bit testing, at least under musl.

>>> it's not a dependency though. just a convenience. right now, we have
>>> humans doing this, and we can always go back to that if we have to.
>>> but if MS is going to give you free CPU cycles to save a little bit of
>>> human time...
>>
>> That would be the "embrace" part, yes. First one's free, don't worry it's
>> harmless you won't get hooked.
> 
> i think the stated intent is to get the next generation of startups
> hooked --- learn to code using github for open source stuff, why not
> use the paid version when you start you company? (i'm personally
> looking forward to the web editor they've talked about, if it's
> anything close to Visual Studio Code --- which it ought to be, given
> that that's just Javascript.)

I'm aware they have a new CEO, but their core business has been monopoly
leverage bundling for 40 years before that. (Right from the start with Ed
Roberts that's what they were trying to establish, and Roberts got so badly
screwed over by them he sold MITS in 1977 and went to med school. They got the
IBM PC contract because they were the "standard" 8-bit BASIC, because Bill's
mother was on the board of directors of the Red Cross with IBM's CEO, because
Gates lied to Kildall about what time he'd set up the meeting with IBM at...)

Ahem. Computer history hobby = I researched how this sausage was made at some
length.

>>>> Adding a .github subdirectory to the source would be a policy change. I'm happy
>>>> with a fork doing it, but am uncomfortable putting it in the main repo. (Not
>>>> fatally uncomfortable, but... ergh?)
>>>
>>> but if it's in a fork, we don't get the benefit. that's basically back
>>> to humans doing something that's a job for a computer...
>>
>> I "git push" from the command line and don't look at the at the web gui for days
>> if not weeks at a time. What does the output of this look like? (Yet more email?)
> 
> i don't know that either. one thing i do know from other open source
> projects on github is pull requests can be automatically built and
> tested. that's pretty cool for both parties.

Yeah, JCI was paying for proprietary github when I did a contract there in 2018.
(And Jira. And whatever IBM's calling Rational Rose this decade.) Every pull
request build failed the entire time I was there, it only ever built right when
merged into mainline. I asked an admin why once, and I think the answer involved
Jenkins running containers in a container and the build's source pull from
upstream repos getting rate limited so there was a local mirror on the wrong
subnet of the intranet?

It's been a while. I think that admin fixed it by disabling the pull builds so
at least we didn't have to kill 'em to get the real build started faster. It
went in the "not my problem" bucket and I moved on...

Presumably Microsoft Github still works until all the people who worked at
github when Microsoft acquired them quit. That was the classic pattern:

https://web.archive.org/web/19991013145536/http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit19990826.html

But who knows, maybe Microsoft is a different company now than it consistently
was in its entire history before the current CEO started in 2014.

Rob