Buildbots

[Páli Gábor János]

2014-04-01 14:03 GMT+02:00 Simon Peyton Jones <simonpj at microsoft.com>:
> Indeed, there is no reason not to use Ian et al's Builder stuff.  It's one of the
> options.  But it depends on a critical evaluation of what the advantages and
> disadvantages of different approaches are

I found Ian's buildbot an appealing alternative as it does a full
build, including testing, and uploads the resulting binaries to a
common place where anybody can access them (but it can be configured
to do almost anything).  The builders may be configured individually
from a single (Haskell-language) configuration file and they are run
on various volunteer-supplied systems so it is also distributed.

I use this to keep track of the status of the FreeBSD builds to make
my work easier on building the releases and maintaining the associated
ports in the FreeBSD Ports Collection, while offering regular
developer snapshots for the users.  This approach also allows me to
control and maintain the builder environment too as it may require
minor or major changes and fixes over time that I can do myself as a
FreeBSD developer.  In the past, there were cases where the build was
failing due to bugs in the kernel or the userland, so this is not
purely about GHC itself (unfortunately).

In my humble opinon, there are merits for the Travis-based Continuous
Integration, so as for the daily snapshot building on each supported
platform.  I do not care if it is not Haskell-based or it is hosted at
a central place with individual Virtual Machines for each platform --
until I can keep doing what I have been doing for 4 years now.