Binary Factory & Windows CI builds temporarily offline

[Ben Cooksley]

Hi everyone,

Due to some issues with MSVC we are currently encountering, the Binary
Factory is currently unable to successfully complete Windows builds.
As part of diagnosing these, reinstallation of MSVC has been required,
which has required Windows CI builds to be disabled temporarily.

It is likely that CI coverage will be restored sometime in the next 24
hours, however Binary Factory capability will take longer.

Unfortunately due to the nature of these failures it is possible we
will not be able to restore full service until Microsoft releases the
3rd preview release of Visual Studio 15.8.

For those interested, the issue preventing us from restoring coverage
is a compiler/linker regression within MSVC in the 15.7 series, which
occurs when building the WebRTC component used within QtWebEngine (and
which also affects builds of Firefox and Chrome for those doing that).

Unfortunately rolling back to an earlier version of MSVC isn't an
option in our case as changes to the Visual Studio build utility
(MSBuild) cause it to pass unsupported arguments to the
compiler/linker when building glib. It would appear that regardless of
the version of Visual Studio you choose to install, you receive a
version of MSBuild which only works properly with 15.7.

In most circumstances this would not be an issue, however other
changes necessitate a complete rebuild of the entire dependency tree
(including glib and Qt).

My apologies for any inconvenience this causes.

Regards,
Ben Cooksley
KDE Sysadmin