Re: [gentoo-user] Re: automated code validation

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Sun, Dec 7, 2014 at 2:16 PM, James <wireless@tampabay.rr.com> wrote:
> Sam Bishop <sam <at> cygnus.email> writes:
>
>> In my mind. Gentoo has the kind of hook you speak of. We just havent
>> refined it or done a good job showing it off to the world.
>> The ebuild format is one of the most powerful packaging standards.
>
>> An automatic test battery for Gentoo could possibly catapult Prefix
>> and similar sub projects forward to much greater adoption, and help
>> Gentoo reap secondary benefits as a result.
>
>> Now all the replying is done, here's the big question, where to organise
>> the bigger picture things? This mailing list? IRC? A new mailing list?
>> I want to get involved in this because I'm going to be building some
>> parts of this already. Why wouldn't I want to give back and help make
>> Gentoo better.
>
> Organization is great, but, practical tools are the first step,imho. In
> order to make this not only useful for Gentoo, but other coders, We need a
> liveUSB, where folks can download "Gentoo Fever" onto a usb stick and stick
> into their current hardware and boot up a killer code development system.

Building a liveUSB version of Gentoo is almost completely orthagonal
to building an automatic ebuild testing system.

A Gentoo CI system doesn't even have to be hosted on Gentoo, or on
Linux for that matter.  Of course, if one were ever to become official
it most likely would be hosted on Gentoo, but most likely not on a box
booted from a USB.

I'm not saying that a liveUSB version of Gentoo wouldn't be nice to
have.  It just has nothing to do with solving this particular problem.
Sure, you need an OS to host a CI solution just like you need hardware
to host a CI solution on, and I wouldn't focus on the OS for the same
reason that I wouldn't focus on the hardware.  You might very well
want to run the CI solution on a cluster, but inventing a new
clustering solution is also orthagonal to building a CI solution.  By
all means work on those projects if you want to, but I wouldn't do it
in the context of building a CI solution.

--
Rich