Making juju work better with gccgo

[Tim Penhey]

Hi folks,

I'm sure most of you are aware that we now use gccgo to compile juju for
the ppc64el and arm64 architectures.

We have a great [0] test suite with juju, and also for most of the
packages that we depend on.  However we can't gate every commit on
testing with both compilers on all the architectures we care about.

So... we need to set up some background tasks.

A key problem we have is that many of our dependent libraries don't
actually pass their own test suites with gccgo, even on amd64 which is
what most developers are using.

A key issue that Dave and I have been poking with a stick is the test
suite for juju/errgo, as it had some failures with gccgo (all passed
with gc).

The guts of the issue is:

   developers need to be testing with gc and gccgo as they go


In addition to this I think we should have reports emailed to juju-dev
about the test failures of dependent packages with either compiler
across the architectures we care about.

Unless you put failures into the face of the developers, they are too
easy to ignore.

Tim



[0] for some value of great