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Fedora Build System - beyond building the distro

Summary

Right now the fedora build system is focused solely on building the packages for the fedora distribution. It has little or no support for building any other arbitrary package set nor for non-fedora (but free software things).

Our goals

  • maintain existing build capabilities in koji (don't break koji)
  • maintain compatibility of our tools (don't break fedpkg)
  • create a fedora-contributor-accessible space where arbitrary pkgs
  from arbitrary repos, with arbitrary dependencies can be built
  against fedora securely and consistently. (coprs)
  • overhaul how we setup and maintain our buildboxes so we can
  redeploy these systems quickly and scale up during high demand.
  (builder git repo)


How we get there

There are a lot of areas needed to make this all come together. I broke the process into a series of smaller components such that we had something useful at each step and could assemble them to become the whole system, like voltron.

Things done or mostly done

Over the last 4 or 5 months I've been working on a series of tools

to achieve our goals

==== Changes to mock ====
  * added mockchain to mock - implements recursive chain builds and
    creates the mock config from base configs adding arbitrary user
    repos. http://git.fedorahosted.org/cgit/mock.git/tree/py/mockchain.py
           http://skvidal.wordpress.com/2012/04/20/mockchain-use-cases-and-examples/
  * added plugin to mock to output the chroot system state as well
    as set of pkgs available in repositories to yum/mock at the time
    of the build. Important criteria for solving build failures due
    to missing build requirements. 

Changes to builders

  * reinstall and vm-ize all of our existing builder hw in the bladecenters
  * setup newbuilder process using libvirtd and ansible to make our builder
    deployment be trivial and consistent.

Work Started

Changes to our infrastructure

  preparing for our private cloud deployment inside phx2. This should
  allow us to create arbitrary and COMPLETELY isolated instances on
  demand without a concern for where to deploy them and if we have
  sufficient resources (or if we have a way of paying for them :)

Coprs web interface

  For user/contributors to submit urls to srpms and build repos
  and have the pkgs from the srpm urls built (recursively) against
  each other and the packages in the build repos. I've started the coprs
  interface as a test case for trying out flask. I have a limited 
  interface and the data saving out to a db. This is insufficient and 
  incomplete currently.

= mockremote/ftbfs tools

  Main control job for spawning arbitrary jobs on remote systems. 
  * mockremote is a single buildsystem mechanism to parcel out jobs
    one at a time and maintain a local repository for them to draw
    build requirements from.
  * ftbfs - multi-builder/multijob builder to attempt to rebuild all
    of fedora distribution packages. This works but needs refactoring
    to scale to hundreds of builder processes. It also has a couple of
    race issues creating a local repo for the whole process. Tested
    on part of rawhide (2500ish pkgs) with good results.



Work Needed/Not Started

Changes to koji

  Script to run in kojira to monitor builders and tasks
   which have not checked in at their regular schedule. This would check
   for abandoned/unfinished jobs and free them back up for another koji
   builder to take up. This will allow us to allocate/deallocate 
   builders without having to worry about:
     #. disabling the builder in koji (finding a kojiadmin)
     #. if a build is currently running on any given host

Storage of COPRS/BUILDS

 Figure out a storage destination for the results of any of these jobs. Right now we don't have a destination in mind for where these
 pkgs should go. Fedorapeople.org was suggested but it is a difficult fit to get files to that system and make sure they are accessible
 and owned by the right users.

Maintenance and harvesting/clean up of all of the above

  * builds/coprs
  * repos
  * builders spawned in scale-up
  * ftbfs dumps.