Since testing/building is a really hard thing in Geronimo and the
large community of projects surrounding it, Dain and I decided it was
time to take action and put our own $$ on the table to help.
Projects like Geronimo, OpenEJB and ActiveMQ have provided us with so
much opportunity, we saw this as a way to give back on a very
personal level. We went out and purchased four servers on our own
dime that we are dedicating to all the projects that comprise
Geronimo. The focus is on providing the large community of
committers on the various projects the resources to test and build
and keep the Geronimo ecosystem running.
We hope these four machines will be the start of something bigger.
When I close my eyes and think big, I see a large federation
consisting of smaller groups of machines from individuals and
companies sharing some common building/testing infrastructure, open
to and co-maintained by members of the community projects, building
all our code all the time and testing it on every variety of OS, VM
and Database imaginable....
We're not there yet. Baby steps. To date I've written a lot of
scripts to do builds, nightly tests with 6 MB emails that tick people
off, unstable builds, official releases, publish jars ... you name
it. Keeping that kind of stuff running a real trick. Other people
have cobbled up some stuff for themselves as well. For the immediate
time-frame, I hope that we can at least use these machines to keep
our various projects built on a regular basis with jars published
using tools we setup and maintain as a community. We sure need it,
releases are too painful.
With that said, meet the family:
stan.gbuild.org
kyle.gbuild.org
kenny.gbuild.org
cartman.build.org
Stan and Kenny are mine, Kyle and Cartman are Dain's. I picked the
domain cause it sounded fun and the machine names for the same
reason. All four boxes are Pentium Dual Core 830s (3.0GHz/2X1MB
Cache, 800MHz FSB), with 2GB RAM and 80GB drives. Accounts available
to committers of Geronimo, OpenEJB, ActiveMQ, ActiveIO and other
Geronimo-related projects upon request.
I've setup a Continuum install and have some of the projects running
in it now:
http://ci.gbuild.org/continuum/servlet/continuum
Huge thanks are in order:
- Dain Sundstrom for not even flinching when the idea when from
"hey lets buy a box" to "hey let's buy four boxes."
- Simula Labs (http://www.simulalabs.com/) for donating hosting
for the four boxes.
- Mergere (http://www.mergere.com/) for helping me setup
Continuum to run our builds.
Immediate needs:
- Some help setting up LDAP for user/group accounts across the
four boxes.
- Help adding more projects to continuum
- Help converting existing projects in continuum to not be "shell
projects" in continuum's eyes.
- Help getting an unstable build script going again.
- Converting anything bash-like to jelly or something m2 supported.
- More boxes?
- Anything you can think of....
-David
