[GHC DevOps Group] FreeBSD in Tier 1

[Manuel M T Chakravarty]

> 11.10.2017, 02:44 Ben Gamari <ben at well-typed.com>:
> 
> However, to move back to the point of cross-platform builds: My concern
> is that I'm not yet convinced that we have a viable plan for extending a
> hosted solution for non-Linux/amd64 environments. The numbers I have
> seen suggest that one incurs more than a 50% performance hit over even
> slow ARM hardware in moving to virtualisation. Even dynamic translation
> of amd64 on amd64 incurs a significant hit (which is the environment we
> would need for a non-Linux operating system on amd64).
> 
> In my mind this is a concern regardless of whether FreeBSD is Tier 1 or
> not. If someone were to step up to maintain FreeBSD, or any other
> non-Linux/amd64 platform, the day after we adopt CircleCI, what would we
> tell them? It seems to me the response may very well be "sorry, we would
> love to support you but our CI infrastructure isn't up the task." This
> gives me pause.
> 
> I am here to be convinced, however.

Firstly, as a general comment IMHO a solution that covers the most important platforms soon, reliably, and with little maintenance from our side is better than a perfectly flexible most general solution later, which suffers from the usual DIY flakiness and costs effort on an ongoing basis.

Secondly, the real problem here a fringe platforms, such as FreeBSD. There are CI solutions for Android and iOS, of course. In other words, ARM is not the problem. 

  ** The problem are platforms used by so few people that no CI provider offers a solution for it. **

These are exactly the platforms that are also used by only very few GHC users.

So, let me be blunt here: if we expend time, effort, and money (all of us are getting paid to do this, I think) on creating and maintaining a maximally general solution whose benefit is reaped by a very small fraction of the GHC users base, we do 99% of GHC users a disservice. I think, this is wrong.

With the CircleCI conf created by Mathieu and the build script you linked to, we should be able to have something running pretty quickly. This seems like the quickest way to get any results to me.

In any case, Mathieu is right, we should write up the requirements. I’ll take a stab at that tomorrow.

Cheers,
Manuel

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