[ubuntu-x] Brute Force Automatic X.org Git-Head Packager

Bryce Harrington bryce at bryceharrington.org
Tue Dec 11 20:43:50 GMT 2007


Hi all,

Ever need to test against Xorg git-head, but didn't have time to do all
the compiling?

Here is a first draft of a tool for handling all this drudgery for us
automagically:

  http://people.ubuntu.com/~bryce/BFAXoGHP/results.html

This is not yet functional, but is put up as a proof-of-concept for
comments.  The web page is not yet automatically generated, and the
package scripts are not yet cronned, and I didn't paste in all the log
and deb links, but I think it's enough to demonstrate the concept.

At the heart of this is Tormod's auto-xorg-git[0] script, which was
designed for semi-interactively creating packages of video drivers from
X.org git-head, using Debian's most excellent step-by-step guide[1].

In order to make the tool work more autonomously, I've added logic[2] to
enable it to brute-force its way through merge problems.  It first
attempts to do a "proper" package build, then gets rude at pushing
things through: Dropping debian patches to the package, dropping changes
to Makefile.am, configure.ac, man pages, and so on.  The result may not
be a package we'd want to distribute directly for Ubuntu, but it should
hopefully produce a package viable enough for testing purposes.

Currently, I'm only using it to build dependencies (protos and libs),
but the plan is to expand this to also include input and video drivers,
and eventually the xorg-server too.

Even though this is an early draft, it's already succeeding at getting a
package built over half the time (39/71).  With more work I think it can
be driven up to 90%, maybe higher.

Anyway, I'd love to hear feedback on this, ideas for extending it, etc.
If you would like to look at the script itself, grab it from my git
repo[2].  Patches would be most welcome!

Bryce


0:  https://wiki.ubuntu.com/XorgOnTheEdge?action=AttachFile
1:  http://wiki.debian.org/XTips
2:  http://alioth.debian.org/~bryce-guest/git/xorg-pkg-tools.git



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