[gentoo-alt] Re: 'Continuous Integration' for Gentoo Prefix?

[Michael Haubenwallner]

On 11/27/2018 09:37 AM, Sam Pfeiffer wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 27, 2018 at 7:20 PM Fabian Groffen <grobian@g.o <mailto:grobian@g.o>> wrote:
>
> > I don't want to depress this entire discussion, but it would be really
> > nice if we could somehow interact with special machines people have at
> > their company or at home.  Prefix needs testing on many different
> > machines (non-Linux) which usually don't exist in docker images.

I second this - and let me add a further aspect here:
What I know from buildbot setup is that the master does provide (mostly shell)
commands to be executed on the slave. This is fine as long as there is limited
visibility for the master. But when a public buildbot master is being hijacked,
it feels too easy to execute malicious commands even on the slave machines.

So over a buildbot like setup, I would prefer a Jenkins like setup, where the
master does provide only trigger information to slaves. And even more appealing
would be a standalone slave setup, where the master does just receive the build
logs for the public, without access to slave machines at all.

> That's alright, we can use QEMU for some more esoteric hardware platforms,> if it's an OS that runs on a normal amd64/x86 computer a Docker image can be
> built (I'm not an expert but there are images to learn how to do it).> Or in the worst case we can create an old-school VM for those weird OS
> and automate the interaction with it (I did it for a robot by dumping all
> disk once and creating a VM from it, it worked ok).

Well... there's a bunch of OSs I fail to imagine the use of cloud driven
hardware for them, like hppa-hpux or ia64-hpux for past ones, and ppc-aix,
ppc-macos, sparc-solaris, arm-linux or m68k-mint for current ones.

> > That said, focussing on the (usually fast) boxes like this to catch
> > dependency problems and more is useful.  In the case below it looks like
> > the ld-wrapper is having issues.  Would it be possible to enter the
> > environment for that failed run?
>
> Glad you see the use of it :) Yeah as I mentioned in the previous mail,
> having docker installed in your machine, to access that exact environment
> after the failed bootstrap just do:
>
> # This will download the image to your machine (it may take a bit of time if its the first time you use docker its around 1GB of data I think)
> docker pull awesomebytes/gentoo_prefix_latest_image
> # This will drop you into a shell in that environment, ready to play!
> docker run -it awesomebytes/gentoo_prefix_latest_image /bin/bash
>
> When you are done you can just type exit.

Nevertheless, having the breaking environment as a docker image where
possible (true for the major OSs we support) really is awesome!

/haubi/