Re: Sending out a request for more buildfarm animals?

On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 11:32 AM, Alvaro Herrera
<alvherre(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> Robert Haas wrote:
>> On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 11:18 AM, Alvaro Herrera
>> <alvherre(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
>> > I guess it depends how likely we think that a different compiler will
>> > change the behavior of the shared invalidation queue. Somebody else
>> > would have to answer that. If not, then clearly we need only 5 animals.
>>
>> This may be heresy, but one of the things that drives me nuts about
>> the buildfarm is that the names of the animals are all weird stuff
>> that I've never heard of, and things on the same machine have
>> completely unrelated names. Would it be crazy to think we might name
>> all of these animals in some way that lets people associated them with
>> each other? e.g. brownbear, blackbear, polarbear, grizzlybear,
>> teddybear?
>
> Sure. I guess it'd be better that people notify somewhere the intention
> to create many animals, somehow, so that we know to pick related names.
> Right now the interface to requesting a new animal is 100% focused on an
> individual animal. Someone had several animals that were all moths, for
> instance, IIRC.
>
> Should we consider renaming Tomas' recent animals? Not sure that this
> would reduce confusion, and it might be heresy as well. Andrew?
>
> Would it help if the buildfarm page had pics of each animal next to its
> name, or something like that?

I'm not sure how helpful pictures would really be, but I bet I'd have
more *fun* looking at the buildfarm status page. :-)

I don't know that I have all the answers as to what would really be
best here. If we were starting over I think a taxonomy might be more
useful than what we have today - e.g. mammals for Linux, avians for
BSD-derived systems, reptiles for other System V-derived systems, and
invertebrates for Windows. But it's surely not worth renaming
everything now. Some easy way to group things on the same actual
system might be worthwhile, though.

--
Robert Haas
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