[arch-devops] Let's get a big build box

[Bartłomiej Piotrowski]

On 22/01/2019 17.02, Sven-Hendrik Haase via arch-devops wrote:
> I believe that the current soyuz is too small for bigger rebuilds and
> big packages for them to get done quickly. I've heard some members of
> the team complain about rebuild times of C++-based rebuilds in the past
> as well. I know that soyuz sits mostly idle currently but I suppose the
> reason for that is that some people build big packages on their own,
> faster machines (I know that I do this and some TUs as well). On my
> machine (12 threads), tensorflow takes ~10h to compile while pytorch and
> arrayfire are at 2-3h. Yes, these are certainly outliers but imagine we
> have quite a few more of these packages that I don't know about. Also
> big rebuilds like KDE, boost would benefit.

Almost 500€ a month is complete overkill for what we do and what we
actually need. This machine is going to stay mostly idle and the fact
that we received huge donation does not justify burning money. I'm also
pretty sure we don't know about more packages like yours because no one
else adds them.

Both KDE and boost rebuilds were doing fine so far.

> Ultimately, we all want Arch CI and then we could theoretically
> dynamically spin up/down big build slaves automatically as we need.
> However, this is currently blocked by reproducible builds AND the
> svn-git migration. Therefore, I don't see that happening any time soon.
> This proposal is for getting a practical solution now and not in a few
> months/years.

I don't think it's blocked by anything but time. Neither git migration
nor reprobuilds affect development of service that would take source
tarball or svn directory as input and return ready packages. We have
access to packet.net thanks to CNCF, I just haven't heard from anyone
actually interested in picking up the slack.

Bartłomiej