Autobuilder on riscosopen.org

Hi.

Currently the CVS updates keep coming and it would be interesting for non-developers to be able to beta test (alpha test?) the latest CVS. So an auto builder that does daily builds of the CVS would be very valuable.

Any chance we will see something like that in the near future?

regards,

Jan Rinze.

We’ve been thinking about it internally within ROOL - it’s definitely something we’d like in the future. There are problems with the fact that the builds have to be done on a RISC OS machine (so not on the same machine that hosts the CVS repository) and we have potentially a lot of builds that we’d like to build automatically – stable and development ROMs for IOMD, Iyonix, Beagle and any future ports, boot sequences, printer stacks, complete disc images, soft-loadable versions of individual modules, C tools distributions, and so on, and we don’t want to hammer our bandwidth by doing that many complete CVS checkouts over the Internet every night. We’ve got some ideas, but they’re still at an early stage right now.

If the cross compilation effort succeeds, then we should be able to run the autobuilder process daily on the same server that hosts our repository, which is what we ideally want – as Ben said, doing autobuilding anywhere else would just hurt our bandwidth so is a non-starter.

doing autobuilding anywhere else would just hurt our bandwidth so is a non-starter.

Well, that definitely wouldn’t have to be the case. Certainly an rsync of the latest changes would be pretty low, or just a plain CVS update. Much less than for example someone checking out the entire source fresh, which is something I imagine happens reasonably often.

I don’t know what you guys pay for bandwidth, but I recently switched to linode.com, which is about US$200/year for the basic plan (and riscos.info probably has similar bandwidth usage to riscosopen.org). Plus you choose the OS to install, so you have full control and don’t have those silly /bin paths ;-)

Dammit, thanks to that posting I’ve just noticed that the price of my hosted machine has gone up again. Now it’s more than twice the amount I originally paid for it.

Still, would be worth it if I needed the 10TB/month allowance.