Re: Setting up bulkbuild

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

Jan-Benedict Glaw <jbglaw%lug-owl.de@localhost> writes:

> I'm interested in building stuff for VAX systems. The current NetBSD
> install images (fresh builds with a number of patches---people are
> working on getting them upstreamed) seems to build quite happily,
> either with gcc-10 or gcc-12.
>
>   Based on that, I'm trying to setup bulkbuild. Got it compiled and
> started it in a `screen`, all in a SIMH environment (ie. it's a
> simulated VAX system.) The goal here is, in the end, to run this in
> conjunction with distcc and/or a number of such SIMH instances in
> parallel. My understanding is that bulkbuild would support both.

You are saying "bulkbuild", but do you mean "pbulk"?  There have been
several bulk build mechanisms over the years.

>   It's now in the "Scanning..." phase and manages to "scan" about 250
> packages per day, with a total of nearly 20k. So it'll be scanning for
> about three months, give or take. Are there ways to speed this up? By
> doing it parallel on several hosts, or create the scan result (I gues
> it's inter-package dependencies?) on a different (faster) host and
> then let the VAXen do actual build work (possibly proxying the
> compilation work through distcc)?

I am very far from an expert, but I would ask: do you want to try to
build some subset first, and then go up, vs trying a full build of all
25K packages?  I would try limited if I were you, and AIUI pbulk has a
facility to build only a list of packages.  I would start off with
meta-packages/bulk-small, which has been curated for exactly this
scenario.  Once that is built, I would move on to bulk-medium.

You ask a really good question about the scan phase being cross.  I
don't know.