Summary from Buildsystem BoF at Desktop Summit

[Volker Krause]

On Monday 15 August 2011 23:31:26 Alexander Neundorf wrote:
> -----------------------------------------
> 8) Testing
> -----------------------------------------
> 
> We shortly discussed testing, continuous builds and nightly builds.
> I hope Volker (or somebody) can write a better summary.
> Volker has a prototype for easily running VM-based builds on Linux-machines,
> which contribute their results to a cdash dashboard.
> Marcus introduced us to cdash at home, which has a similar purpose, i.e. make
> it very easy for people to contribute their machine as a continuous-build
> host to a project.
> It seems there is growing interest in establishing structured testing for
> KDE, also highlighted by Till's talk "The limits of portability".
> More details to come...

ok, so let me explain what I have been working on there.

The idea we came up with in Randa basically is to deploy more or less blank 
Linux VMs in a SETI at Home-style to as many as possible machines. They 
continuously run kdesrc-build with enabled CDash reporting as well as a script 
to install new dependencies. All those scripts are regularly updated from Git, 
allowing us to deploy updates to all VMs out there. The only exception is the 
kdesrc-build config file, which is provided by a central server and downloaded 
before every build run. This allows us to distribute different build 
configurations to all VMs. Right now this config files simply randomized on a 
number of parameters, giving us full coverage with a high probability over 
time (with the time depending on the number of active VMs).

This approach addresses one specific problem of the entire CI topic, namely 
testing as many as possible of the various different build options we have 
(platform profiles, debug vs. release, different dependency versions, with or 
without optional dependencies, etc). This does not address testing on 
different OS/platforms etc., so it's only one piece in the puzzle, not the 
single solution.

"Code" is in kde:scratch/vkrause/crowdci, the VM is created with SUSE Studio: 
http://susegallery.com/a/8ECjUa/kde-crowdci. It still has some blocker bugs 
that prevent it from installing extra dependencies without rebooting, so it 
doesn't get past kdelibs yet, once that is fixed we can do a test deployment 
and see if the approach works as intended. Help is of course welcome :)

regards
Volker


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