Re: Build sheriffs for GNOME

[Simon McVittie <simon mcvittie collabora co uk>]

On 21/01/16 14:54, Emmanuele Bassi wrote:
> In short, I want to ensure that GNOME maintainers become
> a bit more proactive in giving a crap about their modules breaking on
> something that is not their own computers.

Is there a way in which contributors/maintainers can reproduce something
equivalent to what Continuous would build (or a large enough subset of
the dependency stack to reach their packages), in a local virtual
machine where they can debug issues interactively?

In the autobuild systems that I've worked with, I've found that the key
feature that makes them most useful is to avoid "magic" centralized
infrastructure that only a few sysadmins/maintainers can access.

For instance, one of the things I really like about Debian's autopkgtest
initiative (a package-oriented and potentially system-level equivalent
of GNOME installed-tests) is that it's quite well-documented how to get
a local mirror of the environment in which tests are run on the official
infrastructure[1] and how to get something basically equivalent as a
virtual machine image[2].

[1] https://ci.debian.net/doc/file.MAINTAINERS.html
[2] http://manpages.debian.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=adt-virt-qemu

-- 
Simon McVittie
Collabora Ltd. <http://www.collabora.com/>