[Slackbuilds-users] Help offer

[David Spencer]

> I can offer some man power.
> Please contact me by e-mail.
>
[...]
>
> I have some ideas for automated builds of pending submissions, but that is
> for separate discussion (and I don't know how you admins are handling it
> now).

Awesome!

I'm sending this to the list because it needs to be sanity checked by
everybody else :)

As far as I know several people have been thinking independently about
automated testing, continuous integration, etc

I haven't discussed this with anybody until now, but maybe buildbot
could be useful to us. Unless I've made a mistake reading the buildbot
docs, it would allow people to volunteer their own systems as build
hosts. There are a couple of things we would need to worry about -
clean build environment, authentication - but the idea would seem to
fit a project like SlackBuilds.org that tries to exist with minimum
infrastructure of our own.

So the outline idea would be
  - a submission arrives
  - our bot checks if it's a simple update, and how many packages
depend on it -- including optional deps ;)
  - if it's a simple update, and the total expected build time
(including depending packages) is less than a threshold, throw all
those builds and rebuilds at the automatic build queue (I already have
a database of build times)
  - if possible, do builds with multiple build tools (sbopkg sbotools
slackrepo) because diverse tests catch more problems
  - do some automated tests on the final package (e.g. Heinz's lintpkg)
  - if the automatic builds fail, the submitter (maintainer) can see
what happened and resubmit
  - otherwise flag it for manual testing
  - final approval always a human decision

I've got a draft SlackBuild for buildbot-0.9.1, but since 0.9 it's one
of those packages that need to download huge quantities of npm stuff
at build time :(

Anyway I'd love to make some progress on this today, but I have a
wedding to go to -- not mine :)

Thanks!
-D.