[osgeo4w-dev] Shared Amazon Build Instance

[Frank Warmerdam]

Folks,

In recent weeks I have been experimenting with doing OSGeo4W builds
on an Amazon instance.  This has been reasonably successful, and my
intention is to share this with at least some of the other package
builders so that folks can come in and update a package when the
original packager is missing in action for a while (as I often am)
without having to recreate the environment from scratch.

A few notes:

  - I used a "tiny" instance because I'm cheap.  Frankly this has turned
    out to be pretty slow.
  - I've installed Visual Studio Express 2010 (which lead to the ABI/runtime
    issues with gdal plugins) but no other compilers are currently available.
  - I've installed Cygwin and setup my "usual" environment so I can easily
    run nmake/cl.exe from the cygwin shell.
  - I've setup sshd under cygwin so I can ssh in and mostly avoid the
    windowing environment.
  - As a fallback Windows Remote Desktop can be used to connect to the instance
    as the windowing level.  Presumably only one user at  a time.
  - The tiny instance only has 30GB of disk.  I'm not sure if this will be
    much of a constraint.
  - For some reason the OSGeo4W installer doesn't seem to be working quite
    right on this system and won't update my GDAL package normally.  It just
    pretends newer versions don't exist.  I am baffled as to what is going on.
  - There is only one account on the system ("Administrator").
  - The Amazon instance keeps stuff on the "local disk" that I would like
    to persist over time, and I just keep the instance running all the time.
  - I'm paying for this now (about $18/month) but if it is useful to the
    project I'd like to eventually move to having OSGeo pay for it.

I am interested in providing login information to a limited number of
additional developers who think this might be a valuable resource to them.
But keep in mind for now it is still an experiment.

Best regards,
-- 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://home.gdal.org/warmerda
and watch the world go round - Rush    | Geospatial Software Developer