Re: Buildbot improvements

[Carlos O'Donell <carlos@redhat.com>]

On 7/13/21 3:15 PM, DJ Delorie wrote:
>> Another nice thing to have would be to dump a line where one could use
>> to download the container used to run the tests to reproduce it locally
>> (it would still be subject to underlying kernel).
> 
> That one's trickier, for various reasons.  The container *description*
> is trivial (it's in git) but the container is rebuilt *often* - every
> time there's a git commit, the baseline is rebuilt, and that uses
> whatever the latest Fedora baseline is.  For security reasons, we
> discard every build container after every build - there's no telling
> what evil a patch in a mailing list might have - so those get rebuilt
> for every patch.
> 
> Plus, a built container is pretty big.  I wouldn't want to have to store
> and/or transmit those.  About half a gig per build just for the
> build-specific portions, plus whatever the Fedora baseline adds.
> 
> So either it's a lot of data to move around, or I can't guarantee the
> same contents as was built.  In my case (the 32-bit builder) it's
> trivial to just run your own local 32-bit builder.  In the future, we
> hope that build bots will be running on vendor-specific hardware that
> might be difficult for the public to obtain, and then the reasoning
> might differ in favor of storing built containers.  OTOH we expect those
> builds to be of interest to those vendors, who have easier access to
> those containers anyway ;-)

... however, we could output a set of instructions that when used in
a script could reconstitute the built container?

This would mean that for each test we ran the developer could use
the instruction steps to reconstitute the container.

I think there is a good reproducibility argument here.

-- 
Cheers,
Carlos.