[arch-general] Question about automated builder

[Thomas S Hatch]

I have mentioned this subject before on aur-general, but I wanted to open a
discussion about it in the broader community.

I have spent a great deal of my career working with Red Hat Linux, as have
many in the professional Linux world, and there is one project that is
amazingly useful for the Red Hat world, and that is Koji.

You can take a look at the web interface for koji here:
http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/

Basically, koji acts as a continuous build server for the fedora project's
rpms. it has a number of benefits, one is that all of the building is done
in a controlled environment, so we have a %100 assurance that the packages
makedepends are correct, and and the packages are all built inside of clean
chroots.

Koji also allows for very simple mass-rebuilds of packages, since all anyone
needs to do it increment the release number and koji can pick up the change
and build the package.

I have been passively working on a similar project called quarters, but I
must admit that my motivation is somewhat low not knowing if the project is
in demand. So here is my question, do we think that something like this
would be a benefit to Arch? Is this the type of project that should merit my
attention?

Also, if we do think that this would be a good thing to have for Arch, I
would like feedback on what types of features the system would have and how
it would behave. Right now I am following the idea of supporting a
distributed build system so that we can have any number of build servers in
the fray working away to produce Arch packages for us. I am also attempting
to build it in such a way that a database is not required and that the
interface would be amazingly simple (this is Arch after all). This would
mean that by mearly checking into svn a package would be built, and then an
interface would pop up for the right people to sign it off, and once it has
been signed off it would move over.

Or at least that is the basic idea I am running on. The code has not come
very far, but if the Arch community and developers think that this is a good
idea then please let me know, my motivation should soar and I will make Arch
a super continuous package build system!

-Thomas S Hatch
-TU