Stephen Frost wrote:
* Gunnar Wolf (gwolf@gwolf.org) wrote:Most (although not all) of the architectures facing being downgraded are older, slower hardware, and cannot be readily found. Their build speed is my main argument against John Goerzen's proposal [1]. Now, I understand that up to now we have had the requirement of the buildsrunning in the real hardware.Chances are this wouldn't change for 'official' buildds. While not speaking on behalf of the ftpmaster team the impression I've gotten from Anthony at least is that emulated buildds begs the question of the architecture being useful and aren't exactly likely to be met with open arms.
You're fine to run emulated buildds, or whatever else for non-release architectures. Do what you like! Go wild! If you screw up, well, that sucks, but you don't hurt anyone else, and you can always fix it later.
Heck even the "you should never do this, ever, ever, ever" procedure of "rebuilding everything because of ABI changes a few times" isn't so implausible in SCC -- since it doesn't affect other architectures trying to release, or our mirror network. Seriously, if you're even remotely annoyed with the restrictions placed on ports up until now, SCC is *made* for you.
But as far as actually *releasing* architectures that aren't usable enough to run as buildds, well, I just can't see the point. That's an issue for the *release team* though. I think unstable+snapshots are more than enough for toy architectures that people are just maintainig for the fun of it, and while that's not being seriously considered I'm not really seeing much point worrying about more complicated solutions.
Apparently the feeling wrt distcc is somewhat different and is likely to be a more generally accepted solution to the slow-at-compiling issue.
I like distcc -- heck I went to high school with the author -- and I think it's cool. I don't know that it'd be enough to get ports like m68k working quickly enough to meet the 1 or 2 buildds requirement, and it doesn't solve the other issues that arise at all. But hey, I wouldn't have a problem with an m68k+distcc/i386 pairing as a buildd, if all the other requirements were also being dealt with properly. That's also more a DSA/buildd issue though, neither of which are hats of mine.
Cheers, aj