Nightlies

[Karel Gardas]

Austin,

On 01/26/14 04:29 AM, 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.)

honestly speaking, last message from Ian was that builder server waits 
for "abbot" update. That's IIRC. So my i.MX/ARM buildbot and solaris 
buildbot waits for abbot to be update to connect again.

> 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

I got those disconnectivity issue on builder client v2, I've not seen 
them on v1, but this may be just a coincidence.

> 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.

ARM is all right, at least cortex-Ax boards provides 1GB usually and 
sometimes even more. Using NFS or attached drive I've been able to 
perform ghc build as dictated by the builder server in several days (4-5 
IIRC). Pandaboard would be a lot faster (2 days IIRC) but is not that 
stable and I don't have modern cortex-a15 boards here or quad A9, those 
would be even faster. Anyway, if you do not require build every night 
than this is doable on one board. If you require better coverage, then 
more than one board will be needed.

> 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.

Why to waste your precious time on something which was basically done 
already several times in the past and what in its last incarnation done 
by Ian worked quite well? Just please start the venerable builder server 
and let's see people connect again and buildbots running...

Thanks!
Karel