Hi

As a second point, the Yhc team do a variety of builds - some from clean, some from fullclean, some from delete the directory and a completely fresh darcs pull etc. We've found that can help catch things like interface changes, dependancies etc earlier. If you have (or can find) too many Windows/Linux machines etc that might be worth doing - and is pretty easy with buildbot.

As a side point, if you are considering becoming a GHC buildbot slave, and are going to go to the (admitedly pretty small) trouble of installing buildbot etc, you might want to consider becoming a Yhc buildbot. Being a Yhc buildbot takes very little processor power and time - builds take between 3 and 15 mins. Our existing list of buildbots is http://www.indiegigs.co.uk:8010/ , and our details on being a buildbot are http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Yhc/Buildbot . If you do want to be a Yhc buildbot please drop yhc@haskell.org a quick email (cc'ing me, since we've been having some issues of posts bouncing from non-members) Thanks (and appologies for being so off-topic on GHC-users!) Neil

I'm joining this discussion a bit late, but ... I can provide a build machines for netbsd and freebsd. I didn't see those on the URL cited below. They are fairly common, so perhaps I just missed them. In any event, if netbsd and/or freebsd will be helpful, please let me know. Seth Kurtzberg On Mon, 05 Feb 2007 15:28:15 +0000 Simon Marlow wrote:

Neil Mitchell wrote:

...

Hi Simon,

...

Thanks largely to Ian Lynagh, GHC now has a BuildBot infrastructure to automate nightly builds on multiple platforms. This replaces the old set of shell scripts that we used to run nightly builds; now adding new clients to the setup is relatively easy, instructions are here:

http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/BuildBot

Good news! Do you have any idea of how much time a build might take roughly?

It depends how much you want to do: as a rough guide, our really-do-everything builds take about 8 hours on a fast machine, that includes

- 3 compiler stages (only 2 are necessary, the 3rd is a sanity check) - the "extra libraries" - all libraries built for profiling and "unregisterised" - split objects - a full testsuite run, in all the supported ways - 5 runs of the nofib benchmark suite, with various flag settings - build & upload distributions

We can do a "fast" build in much less time: probably about 1 hour for

- 2 compiler stages - core libraries only - no profiled libraries - no split objects - a "fast" testsuite run - no benchmarks

You tell us how much time you have, we can keep your machine busy :-)

...

As a second point, the Yhc team do a variety of builds - some from clean, some from fullclean, some from delete the directory and a completely fresh darcs pull etc. We've found that can help catch things like interface changes, dependancies etc earlier. If you have (or can find) too many Windows/Linux machines etc that might be worth doing - and is pretty easy with buildbot.

All our builds start with a fresh checkout right now. There are certainly things that can go wrong if you don't fully clean the tree and re-configure after updates (e.g. modifications to the configure.ac files), so I'm not sure it would be useful to start from an partially-clean tree.

Cheers, Simon _______________________________________________ Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list Glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users

Thanks for the info; I'll set up the following: - Gentoo Linux on the G4 PPC - OpenBSD for AMD64 for the AMD box. It would be nifty to have an easy-to-view list showing which platforms are covered and which platforms are desired. Richard Wilson MacGyver wrote:

I'm in the processing of setting up a OSX powerpc buildbot on my end. Maybe we can split the effort to increase powerpc coverage?

I believe that there is value in having multiple BuildBots for the same platform. More value is provided when differences are maximized between BuildBots but there is value in having similar BuildBots (particularly, if the similar BuildBots are popular). Even in the relatively monoculture world of Apple, there is a lot of variation: - The G4 and Core chips are 32-bit and the G5, Core 2, and Core 2 Xeon chips are 64-bit. - The G4 chips have some endianess instructions that are not present in the G5s. - The G5 and Core chips may have 1 or 2 cores in them. - The G5 and Core 2 Xeon chips may come in 1 or 2 CPU variations. - The Core 2 Xeon chips will soon come in 2 or 4 core versions. - The PPC chips support 2 major versions of Mac OS X (10.3 and 10.4). - Third party libraries and applications can come from from: - Apple. - darwinports. - fink. - manually installation. - The libraries may have multiple versions. Creating a bunch of similar BuildBots will help improve coverage of these differences. Wilson MacGyver wrote:

You can see that here.

http://darcs.haskell.org:8010/

and it looks like Thomas Davie already has both OSX PPC and OSX intel covered. there is no reason for multiple build-bot for the same platform is there?

Hi, One of the issues the Yhc people had with Mac buildbots is that no one figured out how to get the buildbot slaves to run on startup with a Mac. If one of the Mac people does figure that out, adding it to the wiki would be most appreciated. Thanks Neil On 2/5/07, Malcolm Wallace wrote:

"Wilson MacGyver" wrote:

...

there is no reason for multiple build-bot for the same platform is there?

If you have two or three slaves for each platform, then the buildbot is robustified against downtime of any of the machines (intentional, like going on holiday for a couple of weeks, or unintentional when the machine just dies).

Regards, Malcolm _______________________________________________ Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list Glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users