RAT buildbot troubleshooting (ant task)

[Marvin Humphrey <ma...@rectangular.com>]

Hello RAT-people,

The RAT buildbot that Infra set up for Apache Lucy has a problem -- it's not
ignoring the contents of the .git repository directory.

    http://ci.apache.org/projects/lucy/rat-output.html

I sent email to builds@apache.org a week ago and I opened an INFRA Jira ticket
yesterday.  (This isn't a new problem, FWIW -- it's been broken for
months but I'm just getting around to dealing with it now.)

    https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-6625

It would be great if we could spare Infra from having to perform
time-consuming troubleshooting.  Do any obvious solutions present themselves
to our resident RAT experts when they see that output?  Upgrade RAT on the
buildslave?  Put something in our `rat-excludes` file other than `.git/*`
(which didn't seem to help)?

Unfortunately, I have not been able to duplicate the problem when running the
`ant` task used by the buildbot locally on my laptop.

What I find particularly confusing is that Libcloud also uses Git but does not
seem to have the same problem with its RAT buildbot.

(See INFRA issue for links and details.)

Marvin Humphrey

Re: RAT buildbot troubleshooting (ant task)

[Marvin Humphrey <ma...@rectangular.com>]

On Sat, Aug 3, 2013 at 5:52 AM, Robert Burrell Donkin
<ro...@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> On 08/02/13 23:05, Marvin Humphrey wrote:

>>      https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-6625
>
> Thanks. I've added a comment.

Thank you, your insights have allowed us to work around the problem.

>> It would be great if we could spare Infra from having to perform
>> time-consuming troubleshooting.  Do any obvious solutions present
>> themselves to our resident RAT experts when they see that output?  Upgrade
>> RAT on the buildslave?  Put something in our `rat-excludes` file other than
>> `.git/*` (which didn't seem to help)?
>
> I suspect that upgrading the Ant version would work, or adding a explicit
> fileset exclusion to the ant build task.
>
> I think it would be reasonable for Rat to maintain its own additional list
> of excluded directories independent of the build platform. I've opened a
> JIRA[1] but I think that this change would deserve some thought. So, I'm not
> proposing to address this for the 0.10 Rat release.

Perhaps a sample "exclusions" file instead which includes the line `.git/**`,
with a comment explaining the exclusion file syntax?  (Is the syntax different
when used in Ant vs. Maven?)  That would be less magical than hard-coding
exclusions into the RAT core.  All the projects that I've seen using RAT have
exclusions files, so practically speaking I think people will need their own
eventually, anyway.

Cheers,

Marvin Humphrey

Re: RAT buildbot troubleshooting (ant task)

[Robert Burrell Donkin <ro...@blueyonder.co.uk>]

On 08/02/13 23:05, Marvin Humphrey wrote:
> Hello RAT-people,

Hi Marvin

> The RAT buildbot that Infra set up for Apache Lucy has a problem -- it's not
> ignoring the contents of the .git repository directory.
>
>      http://ci.apache.org/projects/lucy/rat-output.html
>
> I sent email to builds@apache.org a week ago and I opened an INFRA Jira ticket
> yesterday.  (This isn't a new problem, FWIW -- it's been broken for
> months but I'm just getting around to dealing with it now.)
>
>      https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/INFRA-6625

Thanks. I've added a comment.

> It would be great if we could spare Infra from having to perform
> time-consuming troubleshooting.  Do any obvious solutions present themselves
> to our resident RAT experts when they see that output?  Upgrade RAT on the
> buildslave?  Put something in our `rat-excludes` file other than `.git/*`
> (which didn't seem to help)?

I suspect that upgrading the Ant version would work, or adding a 
explicit fileset exclusion to the ant build task.

I think it would be reasonable for Rat to maintain its own additional 
list of excluded directories independent of the build platform. I've 
opened a JIRA[1] but I think that this change would deserve some 
thought. So, I'm not proposing to address this for the 0.10 Rat release.

Robert
[1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/RAT-146