Future Enhancements

[Laurence Urhegyi <laurence urhegyi codethink co uk>]

Hi,

In the afternoon following the BuildStream workshop today we spoke about 
potential future enhancements, which I've listed below. Some of these 
are focused on new users and their experience. We also discussed a few 
points where there was no concrete outcome, which it's probably useful 
to capture, but not really useful to action just yet. For these we 
agreed we should wait and see if there are any actual use cases which 
would benefit from looking into them further down the line.

## Future Enhancements

1) Better Docker Experience
A single Dockerfile, a single experience. We should incorporate some of 
the recent improvements and publish that image to Dockerhub.

2) Smaller base runtimes.
Currently, we have a script to bootstrap a Debian system and import into 
OSTree. Results in a large base system. We'd ideally like a smaller base 
system, possibly Alpine Linux, but this needs to be investigated.

3) Hosted base for getting started.
Would like to have a self-hosted Buildstream base system, instead of 
continuing to use the Debian base system.

4) Example Projects or tutorials.

5) Pulling from mutiple artifact caches.
Allow configuration of secondary artifact caches that would always be 
read only.

6) Provenance of artifacts.
Complete information about how an artifact was created: from what 
sources, what system, what time.

7) Progress bar.
Low down on the list...could be part of an alternative BuildStream front 
end...but something that gives the user an indication of progress - a 
progress bar is the most feasible option.

## Things we discussed that did not have any concrete outcomes:

A) Artifact Cache Server Scaling
B) Distributed Builds
C) Cross - Architecture Builds / Multi Architecture Builds
D) Benchmarks: Number of builds running concurrently and how to 
parallelise each build for full efficiency. There's a huge effort needed 
here to establish these benchmarks.