[Monotone-devel] call for volunteers: auto-build+test machines

[Nathaniel Smith]

Our new Buildbot infrastructure seems to be working well, at:
  http://venge.net:9000/
The idea is simple -- there are a lot of compilers, OSes,
distributions, library versions, architectures, ... out there, and no
one developer's going to do a very good job of making sure things keep
working across all of them.  So, to help us stop breaking things,
we're automatically running builds and the full testsuite on as many
different sorts of machines as we can.

Which is where you come in :-).

I'm looking for volunteers who are willing to run a "buildslave", a
little python program that connects to the "buildmaster" on venge.net,
and knows how to run build/test cycles and report the results back.
It's quite straightforward to set up on any POSIXy system:
   http://venge.net/monotone/bb-howto.txt

Requirements:
  - have some slightly unusual setup.  We already have buildslaves for
    x86 debian unstable and testing, and for fedora core 3; plus
    volunteers for Win32 and possibly OS-X.  Just duplicating these
    doesn't help very much.  Non-x86 architectures, other Unix
    variants, etc., would be very helpful.  (OTOH, if you just want to
    make sure that the next release works out of the box on your
    favorite linux distribution, with whatever weird compiler version
    it uses, etc., then feel free to volunteer; it doesn't really
    cost us anything to have more slaves running.)
  - be willing to accept the security risk.  I've done what I can to
    minimize this -- the buildmaster ignores any changes not signed by
    an explicitly enumerated list of keys, and we strongly recommend
    running the buildslave under its own user id -- but any time
    you have an automated process downloading code and running it,
    there's some risk.
  - be willing to spend the cycles -- you may not want to offer your
    primary desktop machine as a full-compiler-optimization,
    always-rebuild-from-fresh-checkout, buildslave, even if it is
    nice'd :-).
  - have a machine that's generally online and stable.  It's okay if
    you have to reboot occasionally or what-have-you, but if your box
    is only turned on for half the day, or on the other end of a modem,
    or whatever, then this probably isn't for you.

Anyone who does want to volunteer, please send me an email with:
  - your name/contact information, so I can write it down
  - name of the machine(s), so I can write that down too
  - what sort of machine(s) they are -- architecture, OS, compiler
    version you want to use, that kind of thing.
  - how much work you want them to do.  I'd love to get a few machines
    running full "distchecks", but if you can only offer incremental
    unoptimized builds, that's helpful too.  (From-scratch unoptimized
    builds might be a good intermediate choice.)
and I'll get back to you with a username and password for your
buildslave to use.

Thanks a lot; I'm quite excited about this chance to make monotone's
quality even better, and I hope you are too :-).

-- Nathaniel

-- 
Details are all that matters; God dwells there, and you never get to
see Him if you don't struggle to get them right. -- Stephen Jay Gould