I'm a new sheriff, now what?
What is a sheriff?
Sheriffs should have a strong bias towards actions that keep the tree green and then open. For main waterfall bots that are on the Commit Queue, if a simple revert can fix the problem the sheriff should revert first and ask questions later. For bots that are not covered by the Commit Queue and if the author is online, it's fine to ask them to fix asynchronously (since it shouldn't be blocking anyone, and it's not the author's fault as the change landed through the CQ). What is sheriff-o-matic?sheriff-o-matic.appspot.com is a tool to automate the work of sheriffing. It shows you just the failures and it automatically intersects regression ranges across the bots for you. Currently it only works for the Chromium tree. Making it work for other trees is a small amount of work: crbug.com/409693. More on sheriff-o-matic and what to do if it's down: https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/developers/tree-sheriffs/sheriff-o-matic. What is a trooper?Troopers know more about maintaining the buildbot masters and slaves themselves. They're the people to look for when the bots need an OS update, a machine goes offline, checkouts are failing repeatedly, and so on.
What is a gardener?Gardeners are watchers of particular component interactions. They generally watch a component's release or development and move the version included forward when it is compatible. This is called "rolling DEPS", and consists of committing a CL that changes the (Subversion) revision number in some Of particular interest to the Chromium projects are the gardeners who watch the interaction between Skia and Chromium, and those who watch the interaction of Chromium and ChromiumOS. Our 7 out of 8 goal
Sheriffing DetailsSee Sheriff Details: Chromium to revert changes, disable tests, etc.
Common tasksClosing or opening the treeThe tree status can be closed or open. These status levels control the activity of the commit queue. If the tree is open, the commit queue runs as normal.
Effectively communicating tree closureAnnotate the tree status with information about what is known about the status of build failures. For example, automatic closure messages such as... ... should be changed to: ... to indicate that committer 'johnd' has been notified of the problem and is looking into it. Once a fix has been checked in, sheriffs often use status: ... to indicate that a fix/revert has been checked in and the tree will likely be opened soon. Alternatively, if the sheriffs decided to revert first and ask questions later, then the tree status should be changed to:
Effectively communicating tree repairsIf the tree has been closed for an extended time, particularly if the breakage covered more than one working timezone (US Pacific, US Eastern, Europe, Asia), it is considered best practice to communicate what was needed to fix the breakage. That way the next sheriff knows what's been happening, and people in other timezones know what to do next time it breaks the same way.
If the fix was simple, it can be listed in the tree-open status message, such as...
If a more detailed fix was needed, send email to the chromium-dev mailing list explaining what happened. It's a good idea to CC the current and upcoming sheriffs too.
Tips and tricksIt's clobberin' time!Sometimes you just need to clobber (i.e. force a full, clean rebuild of) some class of bots (win, mac+ninja, linux asan using make, etc.). You can do this by landing a landmine change. Docs are here: Chromium Clobber Landmines. Note: if a specific CL is causing bots to break unless they are clobbered, that CL should be reverted first and fixed to avoid this. Forcing a buildTo retry the last build, you can force a build.
For Chromium only, if you check the "Clobber" checkbox, it will also delete the build output directory before redoing the compile.
Note: If this is not a builder (no compile step), then doing a clobber won't do anything. You need to clobber the "Builder" first.
Stopping a buildThere is an option to stop a build, but do not use it! If you stop the build during the update step, the bot is going to be hosed for sure. Again, don't use this option, and if you feel like using it, talk to the troopers first.
Use chromium extensions to annotate buildbot error pagesInstall the buildbot error extension to more quickly isolate errors on stdio pages. See Useful extensions for chromium developers for more information.
PFQ BuildsDocumentation is here in the Pre Flight Queue documentation
Sheriff scheduleBuild sheriff calendar (authoritative)The authoritative list is the on Google Calendar. Here's how to add the sheriff calendar to yours:
To see who the sheriff is, click an event and look at the guest list. (Yes, it would be nice if it showed the people in the event title, but then there's the issue of the event title and the guest list getting out of sync -- no easy answer.) To find when a specific person is going to be sheriff, use google calendar's advanced search box (click the down-triangle in the main search box), select the appropriate sheriff calendar, and type the person's username into the "Who" box.
The script/process that updates the calendars can be found in svn://svn.chromium.org/chrome-internal/trunk/tools/build/scripts/tools/sheriff.
How to swapIf you need to swap shifts with someone, add them to the rotation so that the buildbot and other tools display the proper people as sheriffs. To do this:
Time Zones
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