Andrew Randrianasulu <randrianasulu@gmail.com> writes:
<snip>
> has been
> that of contempt ("the project needs different developer culture")
>
> This was probably badly worded - I mean culture of dividing all patches into very small pieces and running
> full compile pipeline on each nano-change very often.
>
> I consider this bad idea, from cpu time/energy consumption standpoint.
We don't do that. The pipeline is run on each pull request which can be
anything from a few patches to a few hundred. And the reason is obvious
because we are guarding against introducing regressions which prior to
the CI system were very painful to bisect, especially if detected a long
time after their introduction.
We welcome patches to improve the situation but they require careful
analysis of what code coverage each test has before reducing potential
duplication of CI effort. We have already made some efforts towards this
during the 8.0 cycle however fundamentally the reason our test matrix is
so wide is because we are supporting a very wide range of host
architectures, operating systems and build configurations.
Well, then may be really consider splitting qemu? Fast-moving, well tested part limited to most popular host/os combinations, and more slow-moving, experimental and, ahem, *community* part, doing different release cycle, may be different patchflow, still relying on old-fashioned user testing?
Yes, it usually considered good idea to consolidate code in upstream, but realistically as user of less-powered aspects of qemu (m68k Macos guest experiments , ppc sound support under macos 9/10) I already pull more than one maintainer's branch.
I'll try to experiment locally with ipfs, may be it behaves badly with git objects, but hey, I like old times when users were actually able to have some resources and pool them! I like idea of un-tamperability of ipfs copies, so hopefully hosting source code over user's machines and fetching it from there will lessen load on more centralized servers. I am not much of admin, but as long I just host some heap of signed objects going in and out my involvement in process should be manageable, I hope? I do not offer web-based hosting because, well I am living on ~20 000 rubles/month before you subtract bills (~6500 rubles +++), so even small hosting cost push me over the budget, sorry. But I already pay for unlimited (for now) internet, and my desktop machine mostly collects uptime with monitor dpms off, and if it come to it I even think I can dedicate laptop for serving common good.
--
Alex Bennée
Virtualisation Tech Lead @ Linaro