[maemo-developers] Build Server Configuration

[From: Jeremiah Foster]

On Jan 26, 2010, at 1:05 PM, Ed Bartosh wrote:
> 2010/1/26 Jeremiah Foster <jeremiah at jeremiahfoster.com>:
>> 
>> What about tools like qemu and dpkg-cross? Can't they be used to build debs without scratchbox?
>> And my goal is not to necessarily get rid of scratchbox, but rather enable alternatives to the current build toolchain.
> 
> I still don't understand what's so bad with current toolchain and
> autobuilder? I'm asking not just out of curiosity, but because right
> now I have some free time and I'm going to spend it to improve
> autobuilder.
> My plan I was to implement the following features:
> - support for multiple packages builds
> - parallel package builds
> - improvements for external checks
> - support for building tags from garage VCS(svn and git)
> 
> So, if it's not needed and community tends to switch to another build
> system I'd rather do something more useful.

Personally I think it is highly useful the work you do.

What I see as the bottleneck is the political aspect, not the technical aspect. 

Having alternative build environments frees us from having to rely on one autobuilder, one build machine, one process. If we could let in more community resources either through replication or distribution I think we can ease developers lives when the ISP fails to keep the autobuilder up. I realize that we again reach the limit that in order to build, we need proprietary software / tools / blobs so it will be impossible to replicate the current build toolchain, but having an independent, community managed (or assisted) build toolchain would seem to me useful and a worthy goal.

Jeremiah