[gentoo-user] Re: CI Continuous Integration

[James]

Sam Bishop <sam <at> cygnus.email> writes:


> Very interesting. A great example of how something can be both Gentoo
> and Not Gentoo. This is 100% Gentoo unlike Funtoo or Sabayon, but it
> brings in some of their advantages. Gentoo doesn't prevent us from
> having multiple package variants and this leads to cool stuff like
> being able to have a set of layman repositories that ebuilds graduate
> through in stages, from 'dev' to 'test' to 'stable'.

Zentoo is certainly a site worth closer examination for CI ideas.

I also see folks running CI locally on the codes they build
and specifically need to be very robust. Epatch_user is another
need for folks to employ CI on their own (local cluster), imho.



> And this is why I feel so strongly about Gentoo + Git + CI
> While github may not be the right place and raw 'git' not the right
> tool. I am a big fan of how phabricator + arcanist provides workflow
> guarantees on top of using git, such as the 'must pass the linter
> rules + tests' workflow and how it can track and reference external
> repos side by side with the repos it hosts.

I ran across a recent thread [1] on another list about gentoo vs some
of the other more common distros. Folks seem to be firmly in either
camp; but more in the conventional distro camp. What I did find interesting
is lots of corporations are running on hundreds of gentoo systems
and using (chef, puppet, ansible or salt) to ease the management of large
gentoo deployments. It's just nice to know that despite what many say (use a
mainstream distro) Gentoo is alive and doing very well in the corporate world. 

I just wonder why more of them do not openly share management strategies
for large gentoo deployments....? 

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/linuxadmin/comments/2nkswx/gentoo_in_production/



> I feel the future belongs to Gentoo as steward of the ebuild format,
> portage and related tools more than as a 'meta distro'. CI is the
> force multiplier, when anyone who wants to build a "Gentoo powered
> distro" has a documented set of tools they can use to 'stand up the
> infrastructure' for things like package QA using a CI Server, a Binary
> Package build server/server farm, and Binary Package hosting for the
> build artefacts. By rights Gentoo not Debian, Arch or Fedora should be
> the Distro of choice for creating experimental niche distros from but
> we lack the kind of tools to make it 'easy' for people to do. I'm
> currently experimenting to see how many of these I can prototype
> inside Docker containers or LXC images and it looks quite promising.

I'm just now learning and experimenting with docker and LXC. 'etest'
is an interesting tool one of our devs is putting together in the spirit
of testing combinations of flags for testing [2].

[2] https://github.com/alunduil/etest/

I could not agree more. I think Gentoo is on the verge of an emerging
recognition not only of it's uniqueness, but that it fills a gap sorely
need.

I think that if CI and clusters become, "routine" for the masses of gentoo
users, that will spring-board our rank and file members into jobs deploying
Gentoo deeply into the business world. What extremely talented folks have
done with Gentoo, I've seen many many times. Taking that power and
intentionally making it available to the ordinary linux admin (average
skills) could easily revolutionize the computing landscape. Gentoo will
never be easy, but it is a very flexible and through solution for many
areas of need.

Zentoo and the (corporate usage thread) I posted all tell me that Gentoo
is not only alive and doing well, it is on the move!


James