Sorry for the delay in replying to the offers for a powerpc buildd during DebConf. I'm very grateful to Sam and Mark for offering to help with a buildd for powerpc toolchains for Emdebian. This is an outline of how I would like to use a powerpc toolchain buildd: 1. Access would be needed by at least three people (Wookey, myself and Hector Oron who currently arranges builds of the i386 and amd64 toolchains). Alternatively, access could be only via buildd.emdebian.org using a SSH key without a passphrase (see later). https://gallery.debconf.org/mugshots/codehelp https://gallery.debconf.org/mugshots/wookey https://gallery.debconf.org/mugshots/zumbi 2. Access would need 'sudo' privileges which could be limited to chroot and debootstrap (we currently build the i386 and amd64 toolchains inside chroots). 3. Toolchains aren't a single package and uploads to the Emdebian repository cannot be done as easily as with other buildd tasks - there is no single .dsc and package names keep changing. Now, I'm still new to Debian, (DD Oct06) so there may well be something here that I'm missing but, currently we don't have a script to get the packages from the powerpc box to the Emdebian repository. Probably the simplest option is to rsync the toolchain packages to the Emdebian box from a private location on the powerpc buildd. A script on the Emdebian box then manages which packages can be updated and includes them in the repository. 3.1 rsync would use an SSH key on the Emdebian server (without a passphrase) to ensure that we can get the correct files from the correct box via a cron task. That way, all Emdebian developers who have access to the Emdebian server would also have access to the powerpc buildd via that SSH key. 4. Currently, only gcc-4.1 and gcc-4.2 -based toolchains are supported on powerpc because my iBook laptop overheats (i.e. shuts down) sometimes during the build. That could be extended later. 5. Toolchains need to be built within a reasonable time of a new upload to Debian and during a gcc transition, toolchains may need to be built more than once a day. However, on the current amd64 machine, building a toolchain does not appear to have noticeable effects on other tasks running on the same machine. 6. The current toolchain chroots take up about 3Gb each - the powerpc buildd may need one that size, possibly smaller. > I also have a 1GHz G4 (only 256 MB RAM though) on a DSL line that I > can give access to if necessary. It already hosts a PowerPC build bot > for a few free software projects but they have low traffic and it can > handle a lot more. > > That's a bit more than twice as fast CPU wise, though my Cube does have > 512M of RAM which might help with toolchain builds. I don't really mind > either way. RAM probably isn't as much of an issue as CPU speed, disc space and availability via rsync. Is free disc space an issue for either box? Ideas/Comments on my notes above? Problems with anything above? -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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