[ros-release] Question on pre-release on buildfarm (diff. of pre-rel and production etc.)

[Isaac Isao Saito]

Hi ROS-Releasers,

I'm a slow learner and still need to ask a few questions about
pre-release test (let me abbreviate as PT) on ROS buildfarm even
though I'm already a big fan of it.

Q1) A PT failed [1] due to a missing package with the following error.

    [rospack] Error: stack/package openrtm_aist not found

>From regression_test wiki [2], I understand that PT fetches
dependencies from shadow-fixed. But I see the package that's claimed
to be missing `openrtm_aist` do exist in the shadow-fixed.

What's happening here? Am I misunderstanding something?


Q2) Is there a case when a package can be still released even its PT
fails? If so how can I tell that?

I see some PTs fail while production build of the same packages don't.

See Groovy actionlib PT for example [3]. It's failing because building
of some downloaded packages that depend on actionlib fail. And I see
that all of its unit tests passed beforehand.

So can it be said "as long as the unit tests of the tested package passed"?


Q3) Related to Q2, what's the purpose of this passage from the same
regression_test wiki?

    "Additionally, it downloads all repos/stacks that depend on the
tested repos/stacks, and builds/tests them."?

[1] http://jenkins.ros.org/job/prerelease-groovy-openhrp3/ARCH_PARAM=amd64,UBUNTU_PARAM=precise,label=prerelease/2/consoleFull
[2] http://wiki.ros.org/regression_tests#Prerelease_Tests
[3] http://jenkins.ros.org/job/prerelease-groovy-actionlib/ARCH_PARAM=amd64,UBUNTU_PARAM=precise,label=prerelease/7/console

Thanks a lot!

--
Isao Isaac Saito
Software Engineer
TORK (Tokyo Opensource Robotics Kyokai Association) / 東京オープンソースロボティクス協会
http://opensource-robotics.tokyo.jp