Automated Toolchain Building and Testing

[Jan-Benedict Glaw <jbglaw@lug-owl.de>]

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Hi!

My first try on a build robot (http://toolchain.lug-owl.de/buildbot/
and http://toolchain.lug-owl.de/buildbot/timeline.php) is running for
some time now, so I'd like to do a next step.

    (The current homegrown build script is designed to do a
    cross-build with a named --target and no --build/--host, building
    binutils, gold, gdb and stace1 gcc. The testsuite isn't run as of
    now.  And since this isn't a full bootstrap re-building GCC with
    itself, it's mostly a compatibility check for the toolchain
    sources to build with the detected system C compiler.)

While the current setup works quite fine, it's time to extend it to
(as a minimum) run the test suite and report on it. As people
suggested, I had at some other Continuous Integration systems, mostly
Jenkins and BuildBot. Both share a common problem: They require extra
software on a given build slave to work. (Jenkins expects a working
Java installation, BuildBot needs Python and Twisted.) Without having
checked this, I guess that other CI systems impose similar
dependencies.

At this point, I'd like to get some feedback from you!  Do you have
any CI system running that only needs eg. ssh to log-in into a slave
box?  Do you think that it's acceptable for a Toolchain Build Robot to
require Python/Twisted or Java on a slave system? I'm thinking about
some of the more obscure systems (m68k-netbsd, ...) that probably
won't have Java readily running. And even gcj may not be ported to
all systems that otherwise could run a Build Robot slave instance.

The decision thus is like this: Continue to run some self-written CI
system that fits our needs and specifically covers the rarely-used
platforms? Or run one with well-known software, though we'll probably
loose obscure systems?

MfG, JBG

-- 
      Jan-Benedict Glaw      jbglaw@lug-owl.de              +49-172-7608481
Signature of:         "really soon now":      an unspecified period of time, likly to
the second  :                                 be greater than any reasonable definition
                                              of "soon".

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