Future of Android binary factory builds

[Nicolas Fella]

I think Ben's concern is the load on our servers that is created by rebuilding each framework for each application build.

Nico

On 13 December 2019 11:03:06 CET, Aleix Pol <aleixpol at kde.org> wrote:
>On Thu, Dec 12, 2019 at 7:35 PM Nicolas Fella <nicolas.fella at gmx.de>
>wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> this is a breakout of
>https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/release-team/2019-December/011702.html
>since it's not really relevant for the release team.
>>
>> The Android binary factory currently serves two purpose. It serves as
>a CI
>> system in the sense that it catches (compiletime) breakages and it
>provides
>> nightly APKs for beta users.
>>
>> Given that we already have a few applications on Google Play and it's
>likely
>> that more will join in the future I would like to expand the scope of
>it to
>> also provide release builds from it, i.e. from stable branches, with
>binaries
>> built in release mode etc. This aims to replace the custom solutions
>some
>> projects have built for themselves.
>>
>> On Donnerstag, 12. Dezember 2019 18:54:28 CET Ben Cooksley wrote:
>> > With the way Android builds are currently conducted (building every
>> > single dependency from scratch each time) i'm opposed to doing this
>as
>> > it would double what is already quite an expensive load on the
>system
>> > already.
>> >
>> > I'd like to see the Android build process optimised to let it reuse
>> > the results for most dependencies (Frameworks come to mind in
>> > particular) before we head in that direction.
>>
>> Assuming that the general approach of using Docker for the builds is
>fine I
>> would like to propose this:
>> We provide a base image that contains the most common depenencies
>prebuilt,
>> i.e. Qt and the main Frameworks. We provide this in two variants,
>stable and
>> unstable. Stable would provide the latest frameworks release and
>would thus be
>> regularly rebuilt once a month after the Frameworks release. The
>unstable
>> version would contain a master Frameworks build to keep the
>CI/nightly aspect
>> of the builds. This would be rebuilt more often, i.e. once a day.
>This would
>> require a full Frameworks build per day which is still an improvement
>over 20
>> full Frameworks builds per day as we have now. With regard to the Qt
>version I
>> think sticking to the latest release as we do now is fine for both. A
>solution
>> that would not need a full Qt build once a day would thus be
>preferrable, e.g.
>> by using prebuilt Qt binaries or factoring out the Qt build into
>another base
>> image. Application builds then would pick an appropriate base image,
>build the
>> non-framework dependencies and finally the application itself. This
>should
>> reduce the non-necessary frameworks rebuilds by a significant amount.
>>
>> @Ben do you agree with this proposal?
>
>Am I right in the understanding that the reason to do this is we want
>faster builds on binary-factory?
>
>Aleix

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