On Friday 11 April 2003 02:01, Matt Thrailkill wrote:
> > Besides building against GRP would mean a) maintaining a grp chroot 
> > (reasonable) and b) building every package twice - once for myself, once 
for 
> > grp. (No ccache because my cflags are different from grp's). So twice the 
> > build time. Ugh.
> 
> Curious though, how much time is spent trying to build such and such an 
ebuild until you actually get it right and then finally compile something 
that works and installs fine on your box?

Well ok, 'twice' isn't accurate. But it still does mean another full build of 
everything I commit, which is a lot by the same calculation that says it 
would take dedicated server(s) to do this. And we don't all have server-class 
development machines at home. The remote developers'-build-server is much 
better.

> Do you think the onus is more on finding machines to compile it all with or 
machines to host it all with?  I would think that some hotrodder overclocker 
types, the kind that run Gentoo cause they like watching gcc scrolling in an 
xterm, would be able to get an impressive distcc farm built out of the boxes 
they personally own.  Ibiblio probably wouldn't be happy hosting binaries 
though.

The hotrodders are ruled out for the same reason a p2p network is - we 
wouldn't be able to trust them (maybe a few we know, but not just anyone who 
has gentoo and a fast box). We need a server we can control and make sure is 
secure.

If we have a lot of uptodate GRP packages, usage will spread very very rapidly 
and downloads will rival or perhaps pass distfile downloads (remember that 
only a part of the latter goes through our mirrors, some still download from 
packages' homesites). So even if all our existing mirrors ageed to host this 
too, it would more than double the bandwidth we'd use up. It would also 
multiply many times the amount of spaec we take on a mirror, because every 
package would exist for a geat many archs.


-- 
Dan Armak
Gentoo Linux developer (KDE)
Matan, Israel
Public GPG key: http://cvs.gentoo.org/~danarmak/danarmak-gpg-public.key