If you look at that previous posting, you'll see my goals for the project, which include (as I recall):
o having a heterogenous system (solaris, linux, etc.) o having the system be load-balancing. o being able to add and remove hosts from the compilation according to the machine's load average, whether or not it is in use as a desktop, etc. o giving out the fastest machines first, so that compilations are the fastest possible. o supporting many compilations simultaneously from multiple machines.
These goals have all been met by my implementation.
Now, here is the crucial part that may interest you, Assaf and friends: the code is all written in python, which is a wonderful language, IMO. But, as Dan Kegel has suggested, the system may be more widely used, and easier to install if it were written in C. I agree with him.
So, perhaps you would like to take this python code and rewrite it as C code.
Yes, I think something like that would be a good idea! But rather than rewriting exactly what Victor has done, we might want to shuffle it around a bit and fit it into the existing distcc protocol (or make it part of the next version Martin has been working on).
In some cases, that will be no small task. A nice line in python like this:
random.shuffle(avail_cpu_tiers[t])
would probably require hundreds of lines of C code...
Nah, probably only ten lines :-)
o host-server: the main server. This code listens on 4 TCP ports:
IMHO a single port would be better for various reasons.
Next: how distcc comes into play:
In your Makefile/SConstruct/Construct file, you replace
CC = gcc
with
CC = gethost distcc gcc
"gethost" is a python script that connects to the host-server, gets a host from the server, puts it in the DISTCC_HOSTS environment variable, and then runs "distcc gcc <args>". Thus, distcc gets its list of hosts from the environment variable. What I like about this solution is that it required no changes to distcc at all.
But given that we have a crew of people ready to work, IMHO it might be better to incorporate some of the work into distcc itself. And as I mentioned earlier, to match the distcc paradigm, we might want to consider the 'central server' really a 'proxy server', and allow several of them in the system.
So: summary: Here are some items you might do/research:
o rewrite the system in C/C++.
For maximal portibility, C is probably the right choice.
- Dan
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