[Buildroot] [ANNOUNCE] Autobuilder script available, join the autobuilder effort!

[Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni@free-electrons.com>]

Dear Thomas De Schampheleire,

On Wed, 18 Jun 2014 10:47:48 +0200, Thomas De Schampheleire wrote:


> > [environment-variables]
> > BR2_GIT = ...
> > BR2_FOO = ...
> >
> > and then the script makes sure to pass all these variables in the
> > environment when calling make on Buildroot.
> 
> Ok, this is indeed better.
> It's probably easier (for parsing) to let the user specify one
> 'environment' string that contains
> "BR2_GIT=xxx BR2_FOO=yyy"
> than having separate config settings for possibly unknown options.

Right, even better.

> > Wouldn't it be simpler to simply kill the build process when the time
> > happens? So you have a cronjob that starts autobuild-run at 7 PM or 8
> > PM in the evening, and another one that kills autobuild-run at 7 AM or
> > 8 AM. I've tried to handle killing only the main autobuild-run script
> > and make sure it kills the building sub-processes, but it doesn't work
> > completely well so far. It needs to be investigated.
> 
> It's easier, but it has the downside that the ongoing build at the
> time of the kill is always lost (no results available). In the case it
> happens to be a long build of two hours, it's a pity to lose these
> results if the 'stop-time' is not very strict.

That's true, but I find this thing really use-case specific. For
example, maybe on week-ends you will be able to let the builds run even
during day time? So we need to make the script more complex to handle
this possibility, while cron is the perfect tool to do this kind of
thing.

*However* we could add something like a signal sent to the script that
tells it to stop the builds when they are finished. Either a Unix
signal like SIGUSR1, or the creation of a specific file in a specific
location, or something like that. When the script receives this signal,
it knows it should stop itself at the end of the current build. But the
mechanism to generate this signal (cronjob or whatever) remains
external to the script.

What do you think?

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com