RFC: MOTU build farm project.

[Stefan Potyra]

Hi Luke,

Am Freitag 06 Oktober 2006 10:14 schrieb Luke Yelavich:
> Hi all
> As I am sure many of us are aware, it is important that we test build a
> package before uploading/getting sponsored to upload a package to
> universe. For the most part this is fine. We have chroots/pbuilders set
> up for this reason. Yet there are times when a package may build
> successfully on one architecture, yet fail on another. Often most of us
> don't know this is the case, until the package hits the build servers,
> and fails to build, as we do not have access to that architecture's
> hardware to test build on.
>
> Some of us are lucky enough to have access to more than one Ubuntu
> supported architecture, the most common being amd64 and i386, as amd64
> machines can handle i386. Then there are also more of us who happen to
> have access to PowerPC hardware, and so it goes on. If we remember often
> enough, we may also run a test build of a package on these other
> architectures, just to be safe. However, there are also those of us who
> may only have one or two machines, which are likely to be i386.

Just a side note: I've heard rumors that qemu can be used to simulate some 
other arches. Maybe it might also help to do some digging in this direction.

>
> I think it is time that a few of us put our heads together, and came up
> with a solution to allow people who have access to less common
> architectures donate some CPU cycles and bandwidth for others to test
> build/debug architecture specific build failures. Such donation has
> already been done by Brandon Holtsclaw, who has donated access to a few
> MOTUs for building/testing. This has been beneficial for both Brandon,
> who has access to the hardware, and the MOTUs who have accounts on the
> donated hardware, as they can produce packages that are a lot more
> likely to build on all architectures.
>
> I am also sure there are many of us out there who have hardware they
> would like to donate access to, but haven't got around to doing so. I
> have a few ideas on a feature set for such implementation, but I would
> like to get comments/suggestions from others in the MOTU community about
> this idea. In the longterm, I personally believe that such a setup would
> benefit the MOTU community, and will help further improve the quality of
> packages we make available.

I think this is a very good idea. I could have used access to an arch I don't 
have to fix some arch-specific build-failures more than once already :).

Cheers,
   Stefan.
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