compile farm?

[Darren Weber]

On Mon, Mar 23, 2009 at 11:18 AM, Anders F Björklund <afb at macports.org>wrote:

> Darren Weber wrote:
>
>  This suggestion may be too complicated, but it's a thought.  Suppose it is
>> possible to create a "virtual machine" or some kind of encapsulated "clean
>> environment" (perhaps like a java sdk or something), which can contain any
>> of the environments for OSX (10.x), or at least a standardized subset that
>> is required by default for macports builds.  Suppose such an environment
>> could be run from within any OSX system as a virtual machine. Suppose such a
>> "virtual environment" could be distributed on an Xgrid system, it could
>> provide a distributed build system for macports.
>>
>
> This is called a "chroot", and is what MPAB uses to build.
>
> See http://trac.macports.org/wiki/MPAB for all the details.
>
>  OK, back to reality...
>>
>
> Has been for a long time.
>
> --anders
>
>
Hey, of course it exists!  Why recreate the wheel?  Yes, we are "Standing of
the shoulders of giants."

I have it running on my system now, to learn more about it.  I have an OSX
10.5.6 Server on a mac pro (2x quad core zeons, 24 Gb RAM).

First thing I note is that the ReadMe.txt contains instructions for an svn
export.  Two thoughts about that: (a) it can automated as part of the
script, (b) it uses trunk, but that could be any branch of the svn (eg,
stable, unstable, testing, etc. and I would equate trunk with "testing").

I haven't looked into mpab itself, yet.  Can it detect the current platform
and make reasonable changes to the chroot for 10.x variants?  When I run it,
should I pipe the output to a log file?

Do you think it is possible to adapt this for Xgrid compilation?  Is it
possible to have (a) the chroot images distributed, and (b) to have each of
the port builds farmed out to different nodes on the grid.  I assume that
dependency issues prevent (b), so parallel builds of individual packages are
not possible - is that right?  Nevertheless, it should be possible to farm
out the entire autobuild to nodes on a grid for idle-time compilations.

Take care, Darren
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