build system glue scripts and requirements

[Ville Skyttä]

On Fri, 2005-03-18 at 09:50 +0100, Matthias Saou wrote:
> seth vidal wrote :

> >   2. How do folks want packagers to send notices about builds? Just a
> > cvs tag? A webpage? A gpg-signed email with specific content? A custom
> > xmpp/jabber-client to send a custom message to a listening build client
> > across an xmpp infrastructure? :)
> 
> Yeah, a "jabber bot"! :-D
> For me, the easiest would be to trigger a build directly from a form on a
> web page. Ideally, be able to track the build from the same page too :
> Check status, view full build log once finished etc. Sounds easy, but most
> certainly isn't, especially if we plan on supporting other archs than i386/
> x86_64 since it'll mean de-centralized builds.

I think requiring a tag of some kind in CVS to trigger a build would be
cool: it ensures that builds are actually tagged.

Maybe something like this:
"make tag" in a CVS checkout could do the tagging with the appropriate
tag name derived from the package (N?)EVR(+branch?), as well as force-
tag a special transient and moving BUILDME_DAMMIT'ish tag which the
buildsys could look for.  However, the buildsys needs to be able to
figure out when to build based on new tags appearing in CVS or existing
tags being moved to new revisions.  That might be a bit tricky, but I
think it's doable.  Or there could be a special BUILDIT'ish file
(possibly GPG signed) committed to CVS containing checksums of some kind
and the tag to build.

Regarding the tracking, I agree that a web page would work pretty well.
Some examples from Debian:
http://packages.qa.debian.org/
http://buildd.debian.org/

A mail interface should also be there, I think a notification message
after a build containing links to the hypothetical web page for the real
contents (build logs, possibly some other reports like rpmlint, etc) as
in above would be ok.

Triggering a build by sending mail sounds somewhat cumbersome, ditto
having to surf to a specific web page and clicking around.  Being able
to do it with CVS would be ideal IMO.