About the autobuild system

The autobuild system is a fleet of NetWinders, which continually recompile a large pool of source code into binary packages. Hardware for this project has been donated or loaned by individuals from the NetWinder.org community. Like the rest of the netwinder.org site, this is a volunteer-based community project, with no specific release schedule and no fixed objectives. Our current goal is to produce a reasonably complete and current Linux distribution for the StrongARM NetWinder, and to support security patches for older distributions. Here is the obligatory screenshot for your amusement.

Warranty

The NetWinder.org autobuild system is an automated process which runs on a daily basis. There is absolutely no quality control on these packages. It is quite possible that their installation will result in an unstable or nonfunctional system. Use these packages at your own risk. There is absolutely no warranty, including the implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose, for any code generated by the autobuild system. Feedback and suggestions are welcomed; please use the devel mailing list or newsgroup.

Current status

The autobuild system operates on a pool of source packages (SRPMS) and attempts to compile each into a binary package, logging the entire process. Any number of NetWinders can be used in parallel, so as to speed up the overall process. Once all packages have been attempted (a "build pass") then the successfully built binaries are installed on all the build nodes. The entire process is then repeated. Each time, additional packages are completed as more dependencies are satisfied. Once the overall progress is deemed to be suffiently close, we will use the binary packages to make a disk image.

• noname, an incomplete port of Fedora Core 3 (logs, progress)
• newbuck, an incomplete port of Fedora Core 1 (logs, progress)
• nw-9, a port of Redhat 9, released Jul 2003 (logs, progress, release notes)
• rh-8.0, a port of Redhat 8.0, abandoned (logs, progress)
• dm-3.1, old port of RedHat-6.1, (log)

The dm-3.1 entry was done just as a test of the autobuilder - we knew it should be able to recompile itself, and it did so in a single pass.

Thanks

The following individuals have donated or lent equipment to support the construction of the autobuild system. The list is sorted in order when we received the equipment, for lack of a better metric. Many thanks for your generosity and suport!

Most of the coding to support the distributed builds, as well as scripts to generate the web pages, was done by yours truly (Ralph Siemsen). Thanks to Andrew Mileski for countless suggestions, debugging and fixing of troublesome packages (such as rpm itself!), and for the loan of his 8-port ethernet switch until the 24-port unit arrived.