[Frugalware-devel] questions about syncpkgd2

[VMiklos]

hi,

probably you know, there is an old idea about rewriting syncpkgd,
basically with the following goals:

- support more than one buildserver for one arch

- make it more efficent: create a central server that acts like a
  mailbox: receives requests to build (probably from a push hook) and
  gives the syncpkg client daemons packages if they request one. this
  way the response time of the client daemons would be much less, as
  currently _they_ try to determine what packages needs building, which
  is an expensive task and thus they do it only one in 2 hours. also
  then they try to build all the packages, instead of one, then asking
  from the server what to do again

one question i'm not sure about: how to determine if we want to build a
package or not?

the problem is the following: currently we upload packages manually, and
syncd uploads them automatically, too. this causes several problems, for
example syncd may overwrite your build, etc (okay they are not _that_
big problems, the worse can happen is that a user has do -Syu twice,
because first pacman removes the corrupted packages, and second time it
downloads the new ones, but it's quite annoying)

we have to choose:

1) still allow this feature (uploading packages manually and
automatically, too) or

+ no big change, does not violate freedom
- when will we build a pkg? if no upload with in ie 2 hours? that will
  slow down syncd again

2) no longer allow devs to upload packages manually

+ this way we can be sure about the packages are built in a clean
  chroot, no implicit tricks, etc
- if syncd is broken, no package upload is possible
- this new syncd is less tested than the old, it's possible that for the
  first time we'll have problems with it

so, what do you think about this? i think in long-term it would be good
to choose 2), that would ensure a higher package quality

in short-term, maybe it would be good to choose 1), but then we need
this ugly "build the pkg if no fpm uploaded in x time" hack, and we
should decide such an interval

ps: i would not worry about the load of the syncd clients, we already
have 2 dedicated servers and at least 1-1 not-fully-dedicated machine is
waiting for syncd2 to allow them to build :)

thanks,
- VMiklos
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