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Tree Sheriffs

I'm a new sheriff, now what?

Contents

  1. 1 I'm a new sheriff, now what?
  2. 2 What is a sheriff?
  3. 3 What is Sheriff-o-Matic?
  4. 4 What is a trooper?
  5. 5 What is a gardener?
  6. 6 Our 7 out of 8 goal
  7. 7 Sheriffing Details
  8. 8 Common tasks
    1. 8.1 Closing or opening the tree
    2. 8.2 Effectively communicating tree closure
    3. 8.3 Effectively communicating tree repairs
  9. 9 Tips and tricks
    1. 9.1 It's clobberin' time!
    2. 9.2 Use chromium extensions to annotate buildbot error pages
    3. 9.3 Temporarily mark a builder as experimental
  10. 10 PFQ Builds
  11. 11 Sheriff schedule
    1. 11.1 Build sheriff calendar (authoritative)
    2. 11.2 Find out who is currently the sheriff (caveat: broken for APAC)
    3. 11.3 How to swap
  12. 12 Useful urls
  13. 13 Random notes
  14. 14 Time Zones
    1. 14.1 APAC and time zones

  1. Read the tour of the waterfall to understand what you are doing.
  2. Read this page
  3. Read the relevant page for your sheriffing type:
    1. Chromium sheriff
    2. Memory sheriff
    3. Chromium OS sheriff
    4. NaCl sheriff
    5. GPU pixel wrangler
    6. Chromium Perf sheriff
We also have non-tree sheriff rotations: Stability sheriff, Security sheriff, and Blink bug labeling

What is a sheriff?

  • Closes and opens the tree
  • Tracks down people responsible for breakage
  • Backs out broken changes
  • When idle, the sheriff:
    • improves the tools,
    • updates the doc,
    • fix flaky tests,
    • remove reliability signatures
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 (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 is used for the Chromium tree. If you're interested in making it work for other trees, see: crbug.com/409693.

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.
  • Chromium troopers:
  • Chromium OS troopers:
    • Same list as Chromium troopers (see above)
  • NaCl troopers: bradnelson, ncbray, TBD

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 DEPS file, particularly the root DEPS, and then seeing if anything breaks. In some cases the DEPS roll also needs to have a landmine to force a full rebuild (clobber).

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

  • We have a goal of keeping the tree open 7 hours out of every 8. To achieve this goal, sheriffs need to resolve issues as they arise.
  • If the tree is closed automatically, the sheriff needs to change the status within a few minutes to let other people know that someone is looking at the failures.
  • If the sheriff can keep track of the failures on the tree, and those failures are not catastrophic (e.g. compile failing or thousands of test failing), then the tree should stay open.
  • Want to know how you did? Check the status viewer for Chromium, Chromium OS or NaCl. (7/8 = 87.5%)

Sheriffing Details

See Sheriff Details: Chromium to revert changes, disable tests, etc.

Common tasks

Closing or opening the tree

The 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.
  1. Go to chromium-status.appspot.com (Chromium) or chromiumos-status.appspot.com (Chromium OS).
  2. Change the status.
    • To close the tree, include the word "closed" in the status.
    • To open the tree, include the word "open" in the status.

Effectively communicating tree closure

Annotate the tree status with information about what is known about the status of build failures. For example, automatic closure messages such as...

Tree is closed (Automatic: "compile" on "Mac Builder" from 12345: foo@chromium.org)

... should be changed to:

Tree is closed (compile -> johnd)

... 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:

Tree is closed (cycling green)

... 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:

Tree is open (reverted r54321)

Effectively communicating tree repairs

If 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...

Tree open (rebooted Chromium (dbg) to clear tempfiles)

Tree open (svn server came back)

Tree open (reverted r54321)

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 tricks

It'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.

Use chromium extensions to annotate buildbot error pages

Install the buildbot error extension to more quickly isolate errors on stdio pages. See Useful extensions for chromium developers for more information.

Temporarily mark a builder as experimental

If a specific builder is affected by infrastructure problems, or something else that causes the builder to consistently fail, consider using the tree status to mark the builder as experimental while investigating. By marking it as experimental, the CQ will ignore failures from that builder and will not wait for it to complete, but it will still kick off that builder each CQ run.

File a bug for the issue, and set the tree status like this:

Tree is open (EXPERIMENTAL=gale-paladin crbug.com/740411)

You can provide a comma-separated list of builders after EXPERIMENTAL=.

PFQ Builds

Documentation is here in the Pre Flight Queue documentation

Sheriff schedule

Build sheriff calendar (authoritative)

The authoritative list is on Google Calendar. Here's how to add the sheriff calendar to yours:
  1. Sign in to Google Calendar.
  2. Where it says "Other calendars - Add a friend's calendar" add the address for the calendar you want:
If you just want to see the calendars without adding them to your calendar, just follow these links:

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.

Find out who is currently the sheriff (caveat: broken for APAC)

There are two ways to see who the current sheriff is:
  1. BuildBot page: Listed under "sheriffs" at the top left of the page.
  2. IRC: "/msg trungl-bot sheriffs" to privately ask who is sheriff. (You can also type "sheriffs: blah" to publicly ping the sheriffs.)
APAC: Note that the build page currently shows incorrect sheriffs in the APAC time zones (MTV evening), because time zones are hard. On Mondays it will even say "None" even though someone will be rostered on. The calendar is the source of truth. See "APAC and time zones" below.

How to swap

Schedule conflicts happen. You may need to swap your assigned rotation dates. A good approach is to pull up the sheriff calendar and reach out to individuals (in person or by hangouts) with rotations with nearby dates to yours -- they're often more willing to swap. It is not ok to only send an email to a mailing list and skip your shift because nobody replied, make a bigger effort if necessary.

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:
  1. Find your rotation event on your calendar (not sheriff cal) and edit. 
  2. Change your response
    1. choose "No" for "Are you coming?".
    2. Add a note "swapping with _______"
  3. Below that, where Guests are listed, click "Add Guest" and enter your replacement.
  4. Hit "Save" at the top.
  5. Have your replacement repeat this process on their calendar for the days you are taking.
  • Every committer is empowered and encouraged to do any of those things when needed, but the sheriff has overall responsibility in case somebody else is away or not paying attention.
  • The sheriffs receive gatekeeper emails when the tree is being closed automatically. Please take action on these as soon as you can.
  • Everyone helps! Committers must request to be signed up to be a sheriff. If you're a new committer, submit a code review to add yourself (Google-internal: https://chrome-internal.googlesource.com/infra/infra_internal.git/+/master/infra_internal/services/sheriff/) or ping g.co/bugatrooper. You can find your time as sheriff at the "Upcoming sheriffs" list at the end of the Sheriff details pages (e.g., for Chromium). If you need to change the schedule (you're out sick or on vacation), it's your responsibility to find a replacement for your time slot.

Time Zones

PST(CA, WA) EST(NY, Montreal) UTC(London) CET(Munich) JST(Tokyo)
4PM 7PM 0AM 1AM 9AM
5PM 8PM 1AM 2AM 10AM
6PM 9PM 2AM 3AM 11AM
7PM 10PM 3AM 4AM 12PM
8PM 11PM 4AM 5AM 1PM
9PM 0AM 5AM 6AM 2PM
10PM 1AM 6AM 7AM 3PM
11PM 2AM 7AM 8AM 4PM
0AM 3AM 8AM 9AM 5PM
1AM 4AM 9AM 10AM 6PM
2AM 5AM 10AM 11AM 7PM
3AM 6AM 11AM 12PM 8PM
4AM 7AM 12PM 1PM 9PM
5AM 8AM 1PM 2PM 10PM
6AM 9AM 2PM 3PM 11PM
7AM 10AM 3PM 4PM 12PM
8AM 11AM 4PM 5PM 1AM
9AM 12PM 5PM 6PM 2AM
10AM 1PM 6PM 7PM 3AM
11AM 2PM 7PM 8PM 4AM
12PM 3PM 8PM 9PM 5AM
1PM 4PM 9PM 10PM 6AM
2PM 5PM 10PM 11PM 7AM
3PM 6PM 11PM 12PM 8AM

APAC and time zones

This guideline has recently changed. See this thread on chromium-dev. The following is the practice that has been adopted by the Tokyo office; Sydney is transitioning to this policy from the inverse.

If you are sheriffing from an APAC time zone (e.g., Tokyo, Sydney, etc), please note that the BuildBot and trungl-bot systems will be reporting yesterday's sheriff (because it is on California time, which is one day behind). Please sheriff on the days it appears in your calendar and ignore BuildBot. If you need to know who the current sheriff is, please see the Build Sheriff Calendar (above).

Sydneyfolks: This guidance changed on 2017-08-01. We used to use BuildBot as the source of truth and shift the calendar by one day. Infra has asked us to stop doing that to align with TOK.

Infra is aware that BuildBot is using the wrong time zone, and has plans to fix it eventually.