[gentoo-alt] Re: Allow non-interactive bootstrap to be stopped at arbitrary stages

[Michael Haubenwallner]

On 1/13/20 10:03 AM, Sam Pfeiffer wrote:
> Hello,
>
> To ease automated building and debugging of the bootstrap of Gentoo Prefix I would like to propose a patch to add the option to stop the non-interactive bootstrap on specific stages of the bootstrap.

Given that bootstrap-prefix.sh is (=should be) able to resume from whatever
interruption happened to the bootstrap process, what do you think about this
alternative solution:

When starting up the bootstrap process, also set up some shell timer of eg.
5.5 hours (sleep 19800) to kill bootstrap-process.sh, leaving .5 hours to
upload the current docker images much like you already do even after breakage.

> I'm currently doing this in my CI projects [1] <https://github.com/awesomebytes/gentoo_prefix_ci>[2] <https://github.com/awesomebytes/gentoo_prefix_ci_32b> and I'd love to have this added upstream.
>
> I propose a patch like this: https://gist.github.com/awesomebytes/3468477c6c90fe3d985372d50aabba9f
>
> Which is what I'm currently using. It just adds another optional parameter to the commandline (a 3rd one) in non-interactive mode which you tell it after which stage to stop (stage1, stage2, stage3).

FWIW, personally I do prefer commandline options over environment variables,
yet there may be some reason I fail to remember why we use env vars here.

However, I do prefer named over positional commandline arguments, especially
when they are about additional configuration to positional arguments.

> I'm not the most versed person in bash, so maybe there is a more conceptually beautiful way of doing this. My patch is just a proposal (that has been tested and running).
>
> This patch is useful because it allows:
> 1) Easier debugging by stages.
> 2) Allows to split the bootstrap job in parts in CI environments with time limits on jobs to run (e.g. Azure Pipelines time limit is 6h*, and the bootstrap takes in between 5h40-6h40 depending on random things like time to download things, and load on the machine... or packages just taking longer to build).

So yes, I would love to have the bootstrap fit into Azure's 6 hours limit, to
get rid of the VMs I provide using my 2 monthly EUR 45,- credit in Azure cloud.

>
> And this patch should not change anything to anyone else (AFAIK).
>
> Thanks for your time and feedback!
>
> P.S.: I'm used to the GitHub/GitLab workflow of having a graphical interface to do a Pull Request... I don't know how to do this with https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/proj/prefix.git/
> If there is no way, aside of the goal of this email, I'd propose to have a mirror in GitHub.

Mirroring prefix-overlay to github (readonly, for PRs) may make sense indeed.

Thanks!
/haubi/