Although we run RedHat on the server here, I use FreeBSD at home because I like tinkering with the source (FreeBSD provides anonymous CVS access to their entire source tree).
One cool thing that they also have, that not many people know about, is a cluster of build machines (the "bento cluster") that spend all day checking out and building all the third-party applications (they call them "ports"). Build failures are summarized to HTML pages.
My current work screen-scrapes these pages and correlates the data in ways that are more human-friendly. In addition, I pick up the
ports Problem Reports (PRs) and comingle that data. The latest round of changes adds in data from the CVS logs themselves. The aim is to provide one-stop shopping for checking out the state of all applications that build from source (the majority of them). So who needs to be grovelling around looking for RPMs? :-)
See
http://lonesome.dyndns.org:XYZ/bento/errorlogs/newindex.html on my home machine for more, including the abstract of a paper I had submitted to BSDCon 2003 (they passed on it). Note: substitute 4802 for XYZ in the URL (yes, 4802 not 4801; I moved the server to a different machine again). (The reason it doesn't run on :80 is because of the spam-address-harvesters. Hate them.)
Right now some of the reports take too much time to generate, so I'm moving to a database-based model (good thing I have 5 years of experience working on those, eh?) So far, the PR summary pages have gone from 15 minutes to 6 seconds. More work is on the way.
Posted by mark at April 7, 2003 11:48 AM