Build system ideas/requirements

[Roland McGrath]

> I agree, I would rather have a "cvs tag build" or "cvs tag build-test" or 
> something like that. That will queue a build request and provide some sort 
> of URL where one could watch the status.

Any reason this should be a weird cvs hook liks this?
Why not just "curl http://build-it.fedora.redhat.com/pkgname#cvstag"
(that is of course done by "make build")?

>     - assuming a queue of some sort of things that need building
>     - do we have a master controller for builds or do we let all buildhosts
>       fight to empty out the build queue?

MCR does something in between about this.  There may be some wisdom there
to be had from experience with central queueing and driving disparate and
sometimes flaky build iron.  (Internally, contact testing at redhat.com for
the hackers who know MCR.)

>  	- stdout and stderr go to a log accessible online in real time?

Oh please yes.  There is cruft around from tinderbox-like hacks to htmlify
build logs and give good highlighting and easy navigation to finding the
error messages, which is a lot quicker for developers than grovelling plain
logs like beehive users do today.

>     - after the build is done
>  	- dispose of the buildroot?

In the case of failed builds, it would be a nice improvement to have the
loser state sit around for a brief time so a developer can go investigate
why the buildsystem barfed.  Perhaps move it aside, and asynchronously nuke
LRU buildroots triggered by free disk space checks.  OTOH, with developers
always able to do the chroot builds themselves first, perhaps this will not
come up nearly so often as it does with beehive.