Nightlies

[Mateusz Kowalczyk]

On 26/01/14 03:29, Austin Seipp wrote:
> As of right now, Pali's FreeBSD builds seem to be the only nightly
> that is still consistently running (and thanks to him for that!)
> 
> The build infrastructure in its current status is mainly just
> 'unmaintained'. Furthermore there's not really a good roster of
> machines that were/were not part of the system AFAIK aside from the
> old list, and it's unclear what the status of many of those machines
> are (as you said, many haven't checked in in a while.)
> 
> There is much interest in a better nightly infrastructure and people
> have asked me several times about setting one up on IRC. We have
> historically had some problems with the nightly infrastructure, mainly
> things like network disconnectivity or firewalling policies, since
> most people aren't running dedicated internet facing machines (or even
> a dedicated machine at all. Firewalls have been a problem for places
> like MSR from what I understand.)

Why not simply have the clients post the results once a night? If the
builds are nightly, is there really any need to have an open daemon
listening? From what I can tell from
http://darcs.haskell.org/ghcBuilder/builders/ it is simply the matter of
building once a day/night and then posting the results in an e-mail to
the list and uploading the binaries and test results elsewhere. Could we
not simply have a wrapper script around GHC build process that in the
end posts all these results to relevant places? The clients could simply
have a nightly cron job and it'd be up to the slave owner to keep these
builds going as often or as rarely as they want. The only downside is
that you guys can't tell the clients precisely when to run but looking
at build times, it's only once a day anyway.

> Several individual people run Jenkins individually, and I like it, but
> I'm not sure how well it does when spread across the globe in terms of
> networking (and realistically builders will look like that, as we
> can't possibly have a dedicated farm somewhere.) I was also at one
> point worried about the size of such a tool on systems like ARM
> machines where resources are at a premium, but in hindsight this looks
> OK. I'd like any opinions on this if people have deployed things in
> these highly distributed scenarios.
> 
> I have had some ideas for an extremely-minimal nightly build
> infrastructure that would ideally require minimal setup and let
> clients have power over choosing how and when to build, but I have yet
> to find the time to finish the basic implementation to try it.
> 
> 
> On Sat, Jan 25, 2014 at 8:22 PM, Mateusz Kowalczyk
> <fuuzetsu at fuuzetsu.co.uk> wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I'd just like to query the status of the nightly builds. Is anything
>> happening in that area? [1] is right on the front page of the GHC Trac
>> even though no builds were ran for ~5 months. Perhaps it should be
>> moved out of the way if there's no plan to resume these in the near
>> future.
>>
>> Does anything specific need doing to get these to run again?
>>
>> [1]: https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Builder
>> --
>> Mateusz K.
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>>
> 
> 
> 


-- 
Mateusz K.