[GHC DevOps Group] FreeBSD in Tier 1

[Facundo Domínguez]

> 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?

There is the possibility to have someone contribute a machine where
the CI boxes can build the code and run the tests remotely.

Facundo


On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 10:09 PM, Manuel M T Chakravarty
<manuel.chakravarty at tweag.io> wrote:
> 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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