Re: Windows server resources for GNOME

[Andrea Veri <av gnome org>]

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.

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)

Thanks in advance for your answers!

[1] http://win32builder.gnome.org/

[2] https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-list/2014-June/msg00040.html

--
Cheers,

Andrea

Debian Developer,
Fedora / EPEL packager,
GNOME Sysadmin,
GNOME Foundation Membership & Elections Committee Chairman

Homepage: http://www.gnome.org/~av