[ale] Build servers?

Michael B. Trausch mike at trausch.us
Tue Oct 23 04:50:52 EDT 2007


On Tue, 2007-10-23 at 00:56 -0400, Nick Ali wrote:
> On 10/23/07, Michael B. Trausch <mike at trausch.us> wrote:
> > Hey everyone,
> >
> > Does anyone know where I can find information on setting up my own
> > automatic build server?  A friend of mine and myself are trying to
> > manage a (growing) number of packages, and it would be really nice if we
> > could just send them off to our own build server that would build these
> > packages for a target distribution, both x86 and x86-64 architectures.
> 
> I could be wrong, but I think this is what Canonical's Launchpad PPA
> does. Its not your own server, but its supposed to help manage all
> that for you.
> 

I did indeed check that out.

However, it's taken 7 hours (and counting) to build a very simple and
small package.  It looks like their servers are overwhelmed with
activity.  Not a big deal, but I need far quicker response times than
that---this package takes about three minutes to build under pbuilder.

I was able to hack together a shell script that will do automatic builds
for me, where I just need to put together the source package, use 'dput'
to upload them to my server, and a cron job will detect their presence
and kick off a process to handle it.  I need to make some changes and
additions to this script so that I can have it automatically put the
source and binary packages into a repository that is regularly rsync'd
up against a public server so that there is the ability to not have to
manage every aspect of the process.  Perhaps I am re-inventing the
wheel, but that's alright, I suppose.  I couldn't get buildd to work and
it looks like everything that buildd does is for a single system,
anyway, when in reality I want to be able to support two systems for any
given distribution release.  I did find a way to make that happen, so
that's good.

Once I get some polishing done, I will put the script up on my software
page and people can use it if they want something simplistic.  In all
honesty, I am not a developer, but I do manage some packages privately
for Feisty (and now, it seems, Gutsy, too), and need to have some way to
get the important work done while leaving the mundane to my server.  :-P

Besides, the 1 GB limit in PPA is rather constraining---combine that
with the excessively slow response times, and it's not usable for me.
Two or three revisions of OpenOffice, plus the source package, would top
out the PPA storage, and the guy that does Pretty Emacs releases is
nearly out of space in his PPA already, which is rather unfortunate.  I
think that "rolling my own" seems to be the best option here,
(un?)fortunately.

	--- Mike

-- 
Michael B. Trausch                                   mike at trausch.us
home: 404-592-5746, 1                                 www.trausch.us
cell: 678-522-7934                       im: mike at trausch.us, jabber
pidgin/tb2 for ubuntu feisty: www.trausch.us/pidgin

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