Remote package building?
I know I've brought this up at least one time before, but I do believe it would be a fantastic idea to allow for remote package building above and beyond the builders that presently exist for Launchpad. A lot of people have spare machines and I'm certain that a good many of them would be happy to lend them to the cause of promoting Launchpad and Ubuntu. Essentially it runs deeper than just having more builders on hand, allow me to explain...
A good many projects use Launchpad as a primary source of distributing their code and therefore sometimes mission critical updates. Wait times in the build farm have sometimes reached the point of waiting days for packages to be built. Some of these packages might contain serious updates regarding functionality and/or security. In the "instant gratification" world that many of us live in, catching a bug could potentially mean the difference between the success or failure of any given project. If Launchpad were to enable community donated machines to take a load off of the build farm then updates could be pushed faster and more efficiently. It's not a perfect scenario and the occasional machine would go down, but using a system that could compensate for this and redirect as necessary (as I hope the build farm itself is using) then Launchpad could open itself up to a new level of both effectiveness and community interaction.
Personally, I have seen this be an occasional issue here at Launchpad. I'm the lead developer for the Peppermint OS project, which uses a Launchpad PPA as a primary repository for custom and patched packages specifically for the project. It's been awfully tempting to set up an independent server using reprepro, but the effectiveness of the package building here is unbelievably good (compiling from source based on what's available is incredible versus simply building a package, uploading it and publishing it).
All I'm really saying is that it would be 167 sorts of awesome if you guys had more builders to spread the load. What I'm suggesting is that maybe the community could put forth the processing power to make this a reality and make the whole operation a better and smoother running endeavor.
Kendall Weaver
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