Gentoo Archives: gentoo-project

From: Steven J Long <slong@××××××××××××××××××.uk>
To: gentoo-project@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-project] RFC: Automated builds
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 2009 03:19:09
Message-Id: 2617281.mPYIiKQX9D@news.friendly-coders.info
1 Wondering about Gentoo doing automated builds (aka tinderboxing which
2 flameeyes and bonsaikitten were up to) as part of its process. Seems to be
3 a move to git, and git-sha IDs came up wrt caches on dev. (If we had those
4 as a digest type, they'd effectively be free to 'generate' since they'd
5 already be in place.) Instead of splitting at branch level, if we split at
6 repo level, so we had a QA repo where the mdata branch lived (if we did
7 want to split there as well) that'd be an ideal place to base our tinderbox
8 work from. (At server side the bare clone would take very little resource,
9 and we could pull into a fresh clone at the build machine if it were a
10 different host.)
11
12 It seems silly to switch to git for development work and not take advantage
13 of cheap clones to inculcate a slightly more professional process, at the
14 time when it's easiest to do so. The advantage would be that we'd catch
15 more errors before they went to users, and we'd have a point where we can
16 start to do other more interesting things, eg around binpkgs and
17 semi-frozen trees.
18
19 By having it as part of Gentoo's process, there would be less need for
20 externals to devote hours of CPU resource to building the whole tree, and
21 bugzilla wouldn't get bombed with the results; developers would get a
22 pingback (on IRC if there, by email if not) to fix their commit as it's not
23 made it to the tree yet. Gentoo would not need to build whole tree over and
24 over either, just the new stuff as and when it comes in.
25
26 Brought this up here as it's more process than ebuild development, and can
27 be moved to dev easily enough, should it warrant it.
28
29 --
30 #friendly-coders -- We're friendly but we're not /that/ friendly ;-)