Re: build server at home?

[Gergely Nagy <algernon@balabit.hu>]

Dmitry Smirnov <onlyjob@member.fsf.org> writes:

> Could any of you share experience of having your own private build server?
>
> I'm thinking of something which could build uploaded source for as many 
> architectures as possible on amd64 host, and ideally put the results to  
> 'reprepro'-managed tree.
>
> The goal is to simplify package deployment to internal infrastructure for  
> evaluation before upload to debian. 
>
> Any hints for quick start please?

I have a custom system that does something like this, it's pretty
simple, and I'm working on automating even more of it.

What I do, is that I have a couple of sbuild chroots (LVM snapshot
thingies), with which I can build amd64 and i386 packages easily. I also
build packages for a certain derivative distro, not only for Debian, so
whenever I have a package to build, I run a script that does something
like this:

for arch in amd64 i386; do
  for dist in unstable squeeze lucid natty oneiric precise; do
    sbuild --arch $arch -d $dist --apend-to-version="~$dist" \
           -m "MadHouse Project Autobuilder <packages@madhouse-project.org>" \
           $1
  done
done

Then I collect the results and let reprepro do the rest. There are a few
gotchas there, too, because in my case, I have an arch:all package that
should be the same on all platforms, so I manually use reprepro's
includedeb to add it everywhere. Same goes for the source.

I used to have a few virtual machines, which I booted up from the same
build script, ran a build in there, and shut them down, but turned out
that there were no users for my arm and kfreebsd-* packages, so I
stopped doing that.

One of these days, I'll turn this setup into a buildbot setup or
something similar. (Or even learn how buildd & wanna-build work, along
with dak, which I need to learn anyway)

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