Build farm(er)

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

Tomek Sowiński wrote:
> Andrei Alexandrescu napisał:
> 
>> Hello,
>>
>>
>> I was talking yesterday with Walter and Brad about enacting a build farm
>> and the build master who would tend to it.
>>
>> The basic idea is to amass a number of remote machines (real and/or
>> virtual) running various OSs and use them for building and testing
>> recent commits of dmd and phobos. The website will have a "cutting-edge"
>> downloadable package that contains the most recent successful build. At
>> the end of the day I want us to get to the point where I type:
>>
>> % make world
>>
>> and everything is built from source all the way to uploading the
>> installers for all OSs to the website and updating html files accordingly.
>>
>> Walter and I agreed that wine should be adequate for building and
>> testing on Windows, which is helpful because we can use the Unix command
>> line tools throughout.
>>
>> The build master will act as a coordinator of check ins, reviews,
>> builds, test harnesses, and probably more. Walter is currently handling
>> these roles, and he would be relieved to pass them on to someone reliable.
>>
>> Any ideas, proposals, contributions and candidates are welcome!
> 
> An idea: could the assembled farm be reused to build other D projects? Being able to easily run thorough unittests on a variety of 
> machines would be a massive boost in quality of D's software ecosystem.

I think that's a great idea. We only need the appropriate people power 
and computer power. In an ideal world dsource.org would grow to provide 
that, but my perception is that Brad A. can only put this much time into 
it (which is a lot btw).

Andrei