Nightlies

[Páli Gábor János]

On Sun, Jan 26, 2014 at 12:16 PM, Joachim Breitner
<mail at joachim-breitner.de> wrote:
> just to clarify: For what purpose do you want the nightlies? To check
> whether GHC validates cleanly, to compare performance numbers, or to get
> hold of up-to-date binary distributions?

Well, I run those clients primarily because that is (was?) one of the
primary requirements for Tier-1 platforms :-)  And this indeed greatly
helps me to see if something has gone wrong on FreeBSD -- so I can
track down the problems and fix them gradually continuously, therefore
birthing a new release becomes a bit easier.  But yes, I also feel
useful to offer daily snapshots for the interested parties as a side
effect.

> For the first, I’d really really like to see something that runs before
> a change enters master

I am afraid that you may not want to pass each change through all the
supported platforms before moving it to master.  Of course, that is
the ideal case, but it adds some operational cost, and can easily
frustrate developers who do not have access to the given platform
where it fails.

> For the second and third, a build farm like the builders would of course
> be great.

I believe Ian's original project (the builder-server I use) [1] was to
have a distributed farm of builders where anybody is allowed to
dedicate a machine.  Therefore GHC may be built on various platforms
while the cost maintenance is shared between the operators of the
respective platforms.  I think it worked pretty well until the
disappearance of the coordinator machine.

We also used the binary tarballs produced by the builders for the
latest releases -- Ian just set the release flag, waited for the next
day, picked the release tarballs and published them, without any
further interaction.

[1] https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Builder