[SoaS] buildbot cleanup

[David Farning]

Congratulations to dogi, silbe, and bernie on their heroic infrastructure
clean up over the last week!  We have been consolidating production
machines. Leaving more room for vm playgrounds for development.

One of the next areas for clean up is the build farm.
http://buildbot.sugarlabs.org/ [1]. Silbe took over the farm from me over a
year ago.  Yes, that does mean that I am taking responsibility for any early
design flaw while giving silbe create for the thankless job of keeping the
farm productive as it grew to include more and more releases.  It is now
time to rethink the design and implementation of the farm.

The farm started before sugarlabs had any of its own machines.  Sunjammer
was still just a dream.  We started using xen VMs donated by Luke Crawford.
Within a few months this started to become a problem as the version of xen
Luke was using would not run recent distros. So _bernie set up bender at his
former company to run builds.

Current status:
Machine      build-release
bender         debian-squeze-64bit
bender         debian-squeeze-armel
bender         fedora-10-64bit
bender         fedora-10-32bit
bender         fedora-11-64bit
buildslave4 ubuntu-9.4-??bits
housetree    ubuntu-10.4-64 bits

This leads us to:
1. What releases should we build?
2. How can we make the system more maintainable?
3. What features do we want to add to the build machines?

My initial thought are how to make the build farm as modular as possible.
Can we move all of the vms to a single machine? Does bender have the disk
space, memory and bandwidth to run all of the VMs.  Sorry, bernie I don't
see how we can get awy from multiple vms in this case.

1. We set up the buildbot service to run from the bender physical machine.
Buildbot is a pretty standard python app which is served via apache.
2. Run apt-catcher and an rpm cacher from the physical machines.  This will
help reduce bandwidth needs.
3. Set up build slaves as needed.

Other concerns are how consumers of the build farm intend to use the
system.  For example, I make a weekly ISO build on the ubuntu 10.04 machine
and upload it to sunjammer.  The soas developers are talking about doing
something similar.... but with daily builds.



david

1. Notice the copywrite at the bottom of the page 'The Sugar Learning
Project' :) That dates the page.
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