Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo Tinderboxes?

[Steven Lembark <lembark@wrkhors.com>]

> Is there any kind of QA tool that normal end users can contribute CPU
> cycles to? Given the massive combinatorial explosion of package
> configurations that can be installed using Gentoo, one might imagine
> that there's some value in simply installing programs with different
> USE combinations and running the self-tests for those programs.

The Perl community has had CPAN::Reporter for a while and a set of
smoke-test machines that run it. Normal Perl installs run "make test"
as part of the normal install, the reporter feeds back test results
to the authors -- I get a daily report of what failed and where. The
smoke-test servers run CPAN::Reporter on whatever gets checked in each
day.

In today's world it's rather easy to set this up with docker, using
Gentoo and some temp volumes (e.g., example using Gentoo for smoke-
testing CPAN: https://www.slideshare.net/lembark/smoking-docker).

Adding a Reporter-ish layer to a new version of Portage or a smoke-
testing option that does a "emerge --install" into a temp layer in 
Docker, reports the outcome,  and discards the results shouldn't be 
all that hard. 

I'd be happy to work on something like this.

-- 
Steven Lembark                                      5725 Aylesboro Ave
Workhorse Computing                                Pittsburgh PA 15217
lembark@wrkhors.com                                    +1 888 359 3508