[oi-dev] Distribution build system

Deano deano at rattie.demon.co.uk
Wed Mar 16 12:12:37 UTC 2011


A laudable aim but do we have the man power to do it, without negatively
affecting our existing schedules for illumos and stable releases?

 

Bye,
Deano

 

From: Colin Ellis [mailto:panamayacht at gmail.com] 
Sent: 16 March 2011 11:46
To: OpenIndiana Developer mailing list
Subject: Re: [oi-dev] Distribution build system

 

Great idea, worth the pain!

On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 11:35 AM, Andrzej Szeszo <aszeszo at gmail.com> wrote:

Hi All

The project is moving forward very slowly. I my opinion one of the main
reasons behind it is lack of unified distribution build system.

Previous releases were put together manually. Probably one or two core
contributors would be be able to repeat the whole process at this point
without investing significant amount of time into learning how things fit
together. We need distribution release and publishing process to be
automated and repeatable.

There is a significant amount of bug reports in OpenIndiana bug tracker.
Many of bugs require very simple changes to get fixed. URL updates or
branding updates for example. Many contributors are more than capable of
fixing such bugs. Because it is not clear what goes where, and also how to
build and then test things many contributors simply don't bother looking at
bugs at all.

I am proposing creating a unified distribution build system. A system that
would build the whole distribution after issuing a single "make publish" or
similar command.

Having such system will let us to release early, release often. It should
improve the development progress in general. Bugfixes and security updates
would get integrated in no time. New users would have an easy start. We
could point new contributors at the build system and simply ask them to
start hacking. Having all consolidations referenced from a single build
system would make it clear to them where things go. Base system changes,
etc. - core consolidations, new software - add-on consolidation directory,
and so on.

Continuous build system could be implemented using the same tools on the
OpenIndiana build machines, including the SPARC ones.

Many people will say that this is not possible and that even Oracle is not
doing it. I say such system is possible but will require significant amount
of work and significant amount of time to prepare. It will be worth the
effort if done right. All major open source OS distributions have the
release process automated in one way or another. I think this is the key to
our success. Splitting the build and release engineering process between
consolidation maintainers/owners based on Oracle model proved to not to work
well for us.

I would like to start a dialog between the core contributors about such
build system. Discuss whether it is needed or not. And if the decision is
made that it is needed - discuss requirements, technical details and then
actually implement it!

Andrzej

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