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Re: autobuilding and embedded timestamps



On Thu, Nov 23, 2000 at 11:26:33AM +0000, Edmund GRIMLEY EVANS wrote:
> Daniel Jacobowitz <dan@debian.org>:
> 
> > > Do Debian's autobuilders compile repeatedly until the system
> > > converges? If so, how do they detect convergence?
> > 
> > Heck no.  Nothing gets built more than once.  It causes all sorts of
> > problems, but convergence is essentially impossible - we're building
> > ALL of the debian archive, remember?  We can't pick and choose 20
> > packages; we have to deal with 4000 instead.
> 
> Why impossible?
> 
> I don't see that the number of packages changes anything essentially.
> In practice the cost is linear in the number of packages. If you can
> solve the problem of embedded timestamps, then you end up doing an
> extra 4000 builds for each test cycle, which should be feasible.

> * You need some extra CPU power for the autobuilder (roughly
> equivalent to rebuilding every package on each test cycle).

Um... what???  Are we talking on the same wavelength here?

A complete build of Debian, on a top-end machine, would probably take
three or four complete days.  It might take more like two weeks. 
That's not really feasible, and every time you needed to redo a
cycle....

> PS: If a package accidently contains an embedded timestamp, the
> autobuilder should detect the situation rather than go into a loop.

I really doubt that's possible to do reliably.  Who knows what the
timestamp might look like?

You could get away with a small limit on binary delta, perhaps, but
that's fugly.

Dan

/--------------------------------\  /--------------------------------\
|       Daniel Jacobowitz        |__|        SCS Class of 2002       |
|   Debian GNU/Linux Developer    __    Carnegie Mellon University   |
|         dan@debian.org         |  |       dmj+@andrew.cmu.edu      |
\--------------------------------/  \--------------------------------/



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