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[20080516]
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distbb - A new tool for distributed bulk builds
NetBSD's packages collection knows the concept of "bulk builds"
since the NetBSD 1.3 days, when I wrote
the bulk build infrastructure
in pkgsrc/mk/bulk to test if all packages build, and to rebuild (only)
things that were changed. The infrastructure grew, Dan McMahill helped
to optimize many points, and it was working for its purpose.
A few drawbacks were inherent, though -- a long phase of scanning
all Makefiles before the build and the inability to build on more
than one machine/CPU were two of the more annoying ones.
In an attempt to solve those problems, and offer other features,
Joerg Sonnenberger has worked on the
"pbulk"
system for some optimizations. The system is still in development, and
documentation is somewhat spread over several places, which makes it
not a first-hand replacement for the first system.
Due to this, Aleksey Cheusov has adapted pbulk and improved it into
distbb, a tool for distributed bulk builds.
Aleksey compares his system to the other ones
in a
separate mail. Key items are the use of many separate tools for
processing bits, with the core in /bin/sh and awk. A major point
for forking pbulk was also the easier maintenance for Aleksey as
his own project, with less communication overhead for coordination
with the pbulk author.
I guess we'll see what system is the better one. For me, I'll define
the winner as the system that gives me binary packages for a NetBSD release
for all platforms that NetBSD supports.
[Tags: pkgsrc]
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