Re: Windows server resources for GNOME

[Jim Campbell <jcampbell gnome org>]

Hi Andrea,

 

Alan's note to the gnome-infrastructure list reminded me of this thread.  I'm just pinging you off-list about it. Let me know if there's interest in pursuing this further.

 

There's no rush on this - I'm sure you'll be busy with Guadec stuff. But feel free to be in touch about it when you have the time.

 

Thanks,

 

Jim

 

 

On Fri, Jun 27, 2014, at 01:04 PM, Jim Campbell wrote:

Hi Andrea,

 

 

On Tue, Jun 24, 2014, at 07:24 PM, Andrea Veri wrote:

2014-06-20 0:58 GMT+02:00 Jim Campbell <jcampbell gnome org>:

Hi Infrastructure Team,

 

Hi Jim, 

 

In speaking with Ekaterina Gerasimova during a recent docs hackfest, she

said that GNOME would benefit from a Windows server on which to build

GNOME software for Windows. As it turns out, Rackspace has provided a

generous grant of cloud server resources to the ChicagoLUG [0], and

(after discussing it with the LUG), we agreed that providing Windows

server resources to GNOME would be a good thing to do.

 

Is this something that you'd be interested in? If so, please let us know

what kind of server resources you would need. Rackspace provides both

Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 or Windows Server 2012 servers, so hopefully

one of those would work for the group.

 

First of all I would like to thank you for the offer of hosting in advance but I see a few major problems:

 

1. Who is going to administer such machine? Our central configuration management tools are entirely built to work with GNU / Linux distributions and most of all none of us have experience maintaining a Windows Server OS.

2. How developers are expected to connect to this machine and build their binaries? we would require each of them to access the machine and process the build, but is there any build system for Windows that will allow us to do so? (ideally with a FOSS license)

3. How many developers do you expect will benefit from such service? This is the very first time someone proposes a Windows builder and I'm curious to know what projects / products are also targetting Windows users

4. We do provide GTK Win32 / Win64 images already [1], and Tarnyko is also looking for help to keep this initiative up and running.

 

These all sound like legitimate issues - and I don't have resolutions for them. It seems as though those issues would nix any forward motion on this particular effort.

 

5. Do you think we would have some space for the GNOME Infrastructure to set up a few testing istances? (I'm thinking about a test istance for git.g.o, www.gnome.org and OSEM that were lost after the outage at OSUOSL that took down the entire RAID)

 

Yes, please let me know what you would need with regards to resources these test instances. I'm sure that supplying this in place of the Windows server would be fine with our user group.

 

Jim