Re: [gentoo-soc] Project Proposal : GenCC for "Gentoo Community Compiling"

[Patrick Lauer]

On 02/18/2013 09:29 PM, Antoine Pinsard wrote:
[snip]
> The project is to make a tool to ease and encourage cross compiling
> between Gentoo users. Basically, there would be two programs:
>
>  * genccd, a daemon that any Gentoo (or derived) root user could start
> and which wait for external requests to process a compilation.
>  * gencc, a tool that looks for the nearest computers running genccd and
> ask them to process a part of the job required by the command passed as
> parameter. (e.g `gencc emerge -uDN --with-bdeps=y @world`).

So, how do you handle people being evil? What happens if my genccd
always returns 0-byte files? what if it adds random things to execute
code on the user's system?

How do you manage to get a precise environment (including useflags,
correct gcc version, ...) onto the compile host? Wouldn't that be slower
than building it locally?

> This is a very basic approach of the tool but I think it gives the main
> idea of the projet. I would like to have your opinion on whether it
> could be a gsoc project or not. And if it could, what backgrounds it
> would require. I think this is much more about networking and security
> than compiling (though it would require at least a basic knowledge of
> distcc).

It's an idea that comes up every year, but is usually shot down as being
impractical or having serious security flaws.

>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Antoine Pinsard
>
Thanks for your interest, and maybe we can figure out something that
works this year :)

Patrick