[SAC] build server

[Alex Mandel]

On 09/29/2013 09:26 AM, Martin Spott wrote:
> Hi Alex,
> 
> On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 09:01:46AM -0700, Alex Mandel wrote:
> 
>> Also I had an idea, that we should take the "Backup" vm and turn at
>> least part of it into a "Build" vm [...]
> 
> I'm sorry to disagree.
> 
> As far as I understand, the OSGeo infrastructure is meant to host the
> public 'interface' for OSGeo projects.  Quite a few of the sites are
> serving as a flagship for the respective projects and some of them have
> already proven to be 'slightly' ressource-hungry.
> 
> Project build services I've seen in the OSGeo- as well as other
> projects' milieus are typically characerized as being hammered to
> death, I/O-wise.  I don't think we want to run this sort of 'service'
> on a precious ressource which the OSGeo server infrastructure is,
> because it finally would hurt OSGeo projects' 'production' sites.
> 
> And, last but not least, from past exprience I don't trust any promises
> about users behaving cooperatively wrt. using free ressources.
> 
> Cheers,
> 	Martin.
> 

Well QGIS already has been running all these builds on their VM, with
nice. The biggest block has been the amount of disk space, partly
because we didn't know ahead of time that their VM would be doing that
work. In some sense it's actually taking advantage of under-utilized cpu
resources, but I agree there is a threat to I/O.

I agree long term we can't host a lot of building without others
bringing build slaves online, which has been the discussion lately
(postgis channel talked a lot about this idea a few weeks back). QGIS
does have a jenkins service elsewhere, and I wonder if that could play a
role in this.

I'd say the interesting twist is the QGIS builds are all deb package
builds. I've briefly discussed with Jurgen possibly moving the
non-nightlies to launchpad, but that only works for ubuntu and not
debian. As for the nightlies, launchpad seems to slow to keep up with
that. I'm open to some other suggestions.

What QGIS is looking for right now is actually website doc building with
Sphinx, and I suggested if was can move the deb building off their VM
that would enable their website building to happen where it should.
Question is where to move the deb packaging?

Thanks,
Alex