[Qemu-devel] daily builds of pristine upstream sources for qemu, qemu-kvm, and libvirt

[Dustin Kirkland <kirkland@canonical.com>]

Howdy, developers of qemu, qemu-kvm, and libvirt.  I periodically see
bug reports on these lists from users of Ubuntu packages of these
projects.

Since these users are often running some version of the project older
than the current development branch, it's more interesting to know if
the user can reproduce the bug on the latest development sources.

I have constructed some automation that builds Debian/Ubuntu binaries
for amd64, i386, and lpia platforms directly from your master git
repositories every day at 11:00 UTC, and publishes them in a special,
opt-in repository.  These daily builds also drop any specific patches
we may be carrying, in order to minimize the delta between the
binaries built and your upstream sources.
 * https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-virt/+archive/virt-daily-upstream

In the event that an Ubuntu user reports a problem, and there's an
interest in trying to reproduce the problem against the tip of the
development branch, we can point them at this resource for testing
purposes.

Additionally, this tool also has the ability to expose build
breakages.  For example (let's not debug this in this thread), at the
moment, qemu's build is broken, somewhere near:
    ....
      LINK  cris-softmmu/qemu-system-cris
    ../libqemu_common.a(esdaudio.o): In function `qesd_run_in':
    /build/buildd/qemu-0.10.50.20090707062004/audio/esdaudio.c:400:
undefined reference to `audio_pt_lock'
    ....
Launchpad publishes the full build logs available for each
architecture at the link above.  For the above example, the specific
build log is:
 * http://launchpadlibrarian.net/28761559/buildlog_ubuntu-karmic-amd64.qemu_0.10.50.20090707062004-0daily1_FAILEDTOBUILD.txt.gz

If anyone has suggestions as to the utility of this resource, I would
appreciate constructive feedback.


Cheers,
-- 
:-Dustin