Re: GNOME hosting - update

[Olav Vitters <olav bkor dhs org>]

On Tue, Apr 24, 2007 at 05:27:32PM +0200, Iago Toral Quiroga wrote:
> Currently the buildbot setup has two parts, the "master" and the
> "slaves". The master is the server were the builds are instructed and
> the results collected to be shown to the final users, the slaves are the
> servers were the actual builds are done, so we'd have one master and
> 1..N slaves, each slave building Gnome in a different
> Architecture/SO/Configuration/whatever.

Ok, I already thought it was something like that. So I'd want the
machine to host the master as well as one server.

> Users would access the master server, like the one we are currently
> hosting here:
> http://buildbot-gnome.igalia.com/
> while slaves would remain anonymous to the users. 
> 
> At this moment we have just a single slave building Gnome in Debian Sid
> (which is hosted in the same server as the master), but thomasvs is
> working on adding two more slaves running different versions of Fedora.
> 
> Thus, our idea would be to move the master to the Gnome server and allow
> interested contributors to offer slaves that we can plug to the master.
> for example, here at Igalia we would maintain the Debian Sid slave.
> 
> Some issues to have into account:
> 
>    - Each module in a gnome moduleset that's being built in the
> gnome-buildbot needs a port to communicate the master and the slave
> process building that module in the slave machine. That means we would
> need to open ~150 ports in the master for each slave machine we want to
> plug. Would this be a problem?

Not a problem; although it does limit the number of machines we can add
after a while. Every once in a while GNOME gets offered possible
machines to use. Usually we refuse, because having machines all over the
place is not not handy. However, using these machines instead as
buildbots maintained by build-brigade would IMO be a really good
solution.

>    - The master setup is not very easy at this moment :(, I know the
> steps that need to be done and I can write a guide but maybe it's easier
> if I do it myself or I help you in the process. What do you think? Maybe

Suggest to meet on IRC.

> I can write the steps and send them to you so you can take a look and
> tell me what you think about the process.

Writing it down is ok too.

>    - Maintenance: we would like to improve the gnome buildbot adding new
> features, etc. How would the update process be if the master is hosted
> in a Gnome machine? Would there be any restrictions or something? Would
> we have root access to the server? 

You would not have root access (is not a problem for those external
machines I noted previously(. Ideally I'd want it to auto-update after a
commit to SVN.
Shell access wouldn't be a problem (with sudo to the 'buildbot' user).

> That's all I can think of right now, if something else comes to my mind
> I let you know :). 
> 
> Btw, about the software, I think that in order to run the master we
> would not need a lot of stuff, as the build process is not done there
> but in the slaves.

I'd want a slave as well. If we use this machine only for a master I'd
assume it would be doing nothing most of the time.


-- 
Regards,
Olav