On 8 December 2014 at 08:54, Rich Freeman <ri...@gentoo.org> wrote: > On Sun, Dec 7, 2014 at 5:42 PM, James <wirel...@tampabay.rr.com> wrote: >> Rich Freeman <rich0 <at> gentoo.org> writes: >>> > liveUSB, where folks can download "Gentoo Fever" onto a usb stick and >>> > stick >>> > into their current hardware and boot up a killer code development system. >>> >>> Building a liveUSB version of Gentoo is almost completely orthagonal >>> to building an automatic ebuild testing system. >> >> Agreed from where you sit. Where I sit, when I explain to folks about >> this project, a liveUSB stick running the latest in what gentoo-fever >> is, speaks volumes to encourage non-gentoo folks to take it for a test >> drive. > > I didn't say it was a bad idea. I just said that it had nothing to do > with Continuous Integration (CI). > > If a billion people used Gentoo for 8 hours a day straight, that would > also have nothing to do with CI. > >> >>> >>> A Gentoo CI system doesn't even have to be hosted on Gentoo, or on >>> Linux for that matter. Of course, if one were ever to become official >>> it most likely would be hosted on Gentoo, but most likely not on a box >>> booted from a USB. >> >> Um, I never saw "CI" defined, so please define specifically, then >> use the abbrev? >> > > Continuous Integration is probably being used a bit loosely here. The > concept is testing every commit to ensure a level of quality. Commits > wouldn't directly hit users - they would be tested first (perhaps in > batches), and then would only hit users if they pass. Or something > along those lines. Maybe it would just refer to frequently testing > the tree with automated bug reporting. > > None of this has to do with having a USB live distro. >
Well the same kind of minimal core is useful/needed as the 'base' from which ebuild test runs can be done on top of. So its not a completely orthogonal problem. >> >>> I'm not saying that a liveUSB version of Gentoo wouldn't be nice to >>> have. It just has nothing to do with solving this particular problem. >> >> OK, see above; you are right technically. Do you want a few dozen >> participates or a few thousand? > > I want ZERO participants. That's the whole point. It is supposed to > be automated. > > Sure, somebody has to write the code, but I doubt handing out liveUSB > images is going to inspire that. > > Also, if your main goal was to have a quick easy-to-use Linux desktop, > I'm not quite sure why you'd pick Gentoo in particular to base it on. > The whole point of Gentoo is that you can change it, while a liveUSB > tends to imply something static and standardized. > > Heck, they could use ChromeOS as it is a Gentoo derivative. However, > if you want something in-between Sabayon is probably about right. :) > Gentoo is actually capable of everything that draws people to Arch Linux. The only reason anyone ever gives me for using Arch Linux is the AUR which is pretty much 'portage plus layman for dummies'. So Gentoo does have the ability to give people what they want, we just have no way to support that kind of use case at present. I agree a live USB image wont really 'inspire' anything. But it does represent a useful goal. The same infrastructure that tests ebuilds would be able to generate boot-able images. You may not have been far off the mark with ChromeOS, I think it may be possible to use those tools to build an image without much fuss at all. I would need to remove a fair number of ChromeOS and CoreOS parts from the setup I currently have but it should in theory work fairly easily. But other than improving the process of building a base image, it doesn't really get us anywhere closer to the goal of automation and CI. Rich, you mentioned zero participants and your right on the money, which is why I'm still wondering where people want to collaborate on this effort. Working code and projects is nice but having things spread over several projects doesn't help keep things easy to manage or deal with discussions about how we integrate things together. For instance at some point this should integrate into the ebuild arch unstable masking for all of Gentoo and then things get 'political'.
