Do me a favor– check out my new experimental prototype of the FATE front page, one in which results are available immediately after they are logged by a build machine (no up-to-15-minute cache delay). There is a lot it doesn’t do yet. And of course, I’m still terrible at web development, so it’s still hideous and awkward. However, it is now possible to freely sort the build/test results by 3 criteria– the default is to sort by failed builds first, then by ascending “tests passed” numbers, and then by architecture. No particular reason for that last default, but the first 2 are intended to illustrate immediately where the current problems lie within the FFmpeg codebase. Since the criteria are specified through the URL via a GET request, you can easily bookmark your favorite sort order. In the future, I hope to send out a cookie so that the main page at least remembers what your last sort order was.
Let me know if I’m on the right track with this.
Very basic TODO: When selecting new criteria, make sure the list boxes are preset to those chosen criteria rather than the global defaults. (I told you I’m bad at this.)
Links to the build details are the next natural step, I think, but otherwise it’s functional and fast. If you’re looking for inspiration you should check out the result pages for CI servers such as TeamCity — it’s a lot more generic than FATE will have have to be, but it’s used by a big enough variety of projects that it might be worth looking at. CruiseControl (or it’s .NET sibling CC.NET) might also give you a few ideas: http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/images/dotnetjunkies_com/mlorengo/1946/r_CruiseControlWeb.png
I think sorting by arch only is a bit weird, it leads to this:
x86_32 / Windows/Cygwin / gcc 3.4.6
x86_32 / DOS / gcc 4.2.4
x86_32 / Windows/Cygwin / gcc 4.2.4
Also usability wise it would be nice if you could set sorting by one of the columns by clicking on the heading.
Where first clicking would sort it in increasing order, then clicking on the same heading again would change to decreasing order and clicking again would output everything in “native”, unsorted order (for the application where I did it the last one was useful, not sure here).
I’d show you the code, but since it is in Perl I guess it wouldn’t be much help…
@Tomer: Linking to the build records or any other information provided by the current index.php script won’t be a problem, just as soon as I get the prototype script integrated back into the old script.
@Reimar: Sort order links in the header shouldn’t be too difficult since I can specify the desired search orders via URL parameters.