[arch-general] Question about automated builder

[Thomas S Hatch]

On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 3:12 PM, Magnus Therning <magnus at therning.org>wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 01:10:34PM -0700, Thomas S Hatch wrote:
> [..]
> > Yes, there sure is, there is a lot of backend code that I am working
> > on, but this is coming along!
> >
> > I am still as much as a few months out from having it production
> > ready, and I am a few weeks away from initial functionality testing.
> >
> > here is the github repo:
> >
> > https://github.com/thatch45/Quarters
>
> Great.  Let me know if you need someone to feed it packages to build.
> I have a few Haskell packages to build each week ;-)
>
> I'm surprised you're using python, no OCaml? ;-)
>
> /M
>
> --
> Magnus Therning                      OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4
> email: magnus at therning.org   jabber: magnus at therning.org
> twitter: magthe               http://therning.org/magnus
>
> I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have
> C++ in mind.
>     -- Alan Kay
>

Heh, I like OCaml, but I chose Python for a few reasons, one was so that
more people could hack on it, I want it to be very modular, so for instance
it will be possible to make a variety of modules to watch different SCM
managers, and it wil be possible to write builder daemons in any language.
This will make it easy for me to port the system to a faster language if we
see the need.

Also, python's libs are much more mature, and while I like OCaml a lot, I
have written hundreds of thousands of lines of production python, and far
less OCaml.

I have a few mechanisms to make for package feeding, so for instance, it
will watch scm repos for changes and build PKGBUILDs found therein, but I
also plan to make an interface that can be used to just feed it source
packages. So I will ask for some people to send it source packages to test
once I get it going.

Also, I will be asking people to try and break it with PKGBUILDS as well, to
see if PKGBUILDS can be made that can break out of the build root etc.

-Thomas S Hatch