www.buildd.net FAQ
This is the FAQ for www.buildd.net and is intended to help you find your way across these pages. It is not a general buildd FAQ. If you search buildd regarding help, please have
a look at the entry page of www.buildd.net. There are several helpful pages linked.
Content:
What is this all about?
Some years ago the m68k port was in a very bad shape. There was just kullervo as a buildd for m68k and over the time it couldn't keep up building packages.
There were roughly around 400 packages in Needs-Build state, when I read on the debian-68k mailing list a posting from Christian Steigies searching for help. Because my Amiga 3000 with 68040/40
was just doing dnet rc5 key cracking, I thought that helping Debian with the m68k port might be a more valuable effort for that machine than just cracking keys for dnetc.
Well, arrakis was then the second buildd for m68k and within weeks the backlog was brought down. But over time the number of packages raised and the complexity of packages as well, resulting
in new backlogs from time to time. So, over time there has been a sort of "buildd farm" for m68k established and a completely own infrastructure was used.
The precessor of these pages was first setup by Rick Younie and located on his buildd, named "bruno". Then these pages moved to a new public machine called "crest". In the meanwhile
these pages became useful not only for the m68k porters to check the status of their builds, but also for Debian Developers and maintainers. From time to time a maintainer asked why this kind
of page only exist for m68k and not for the other archs as well?
One of the reason might have been that the parsing and generation of the page took up to 10 minutes on crest - only for m68k. Due to this fact, Rick disabled this service on crest during autumn 2003 because it
took too much cpu time away. I offered him to host this service on my service and so the page moved. First it was available under http://m68k.bluespice.org/ but then I registered buildd.net and .org
later on, because we enabled the generation of buildd stats for all archs. On the new machine it took only 2 minutes - for all archs.
Well, the page became quite well-known and was referenced by other people and I'm happy that many Debian Developers appreciate this service as an additional source of information to buildd.debian.org.
Therefore, I invested some time to enhance these pages a little bit, made them more supportable by me and added some new feature such as buildd status update, new graphical stats and some minor improvements (f.e.
you can now see how old the wanna-build data is from which these pages are generated).
Yeah, but why all this?
It's simple. Because during the years there always arose the same kind questions on the m68k porters list, like "Why is m68k holding my package to go into testing?", "Please rebuild my package xyz!", etc..
These pages try to give you (as a maintainer) a helping hand to find your answers on your own. www.buildd.net lists some buildd related texts such as from Wouter Verhelst or Michael Schmitz. And it tries
to help you to find your wanted information as quick and easy as possible.
So, if you have some idea to make this even better usuable for you, please let me know! :-)
Why are there just hppa/ia64/m68k as listed archs now?
That's simple. The other archs are not cooperating with buildd.net. This
service is a voluntarily service and I invest time and money to
improve this service and to give something back to the Debian project.
Unfortunately there were some disputes in the past about the buildd
infrastructure, mainly this can be focussed on problems with the famous
"cabal" of Debian. Therefore, I'm not longer willing to spent my time and
money for unwilling to communicate/cooperate members of the cabal. It is my
personal decision and I really admit that you as a developer have to deal
with this (now limited) service.
What do all those LEDs mean on the arch pages?
The little LED-style images are intended to give a quick overview to all buildds of an arch. There a basically several types of status LEDs: for the host itself and for the buildd in particular. More to come.
Here a some common meanings:
Host centric LEDs:
up
The host is up and running. It regulary updates its status. Everything is fine with the machine itself and its connectivity.
no response
The host exceeded its update interval by 1.25x the previous interval. It is now marked as no responding. This might be caused by a intermittent network problem for example.
down
The machine hasn't updated its status 4x in a row. It is marked as down now. The might be caused by a crash of the machine.
not participating
The buildd admin has decided to not participate with his machine. For whatever reason he has. Ask him. :-)
buildd centric LEDs:
wait for key
The buildd has no access to wanna-build database and cannot automatically build packages therefore. But maybe some friendly mind runs some manuals builds on it to use its CPU for something useful.
need setup
Usually this occurs when a new buildd is added. But it might happen as well that this was caused by a serious chroot breakage and the admin needs to re-install the buildd environment.
The buildd host list is updated every 15 mins. You can see the time of last update on the buttom of the page.
On the buildd db_status page, what do the columns mean?
arch
Well, this is obvious, isn't it? ;-)
name
This too. It's the shortname of the buildd. Usually this can be found as well in the build logs you can find on buildd.debian.org.
lastseen
Lastseen is the timestamp when the buildd updated its status the last time. The time is in localtime, which is for the server location during the northern summertime CEST = UTC+2 and during winter CET = UTC+1. Usually all times on this site are in that timezone if not otherwise stated.
interval
The interval is the time between two updates and is important for the last column.
expected at
This is probably the most important column. It defines until when a buildd have to update its status again to not marked as being down. It is 4x the interval duration. After 1.25x the interval the machine will be marked as "no response".
I'm running a buildd. How can I participate?
When you're running a buildd, it is pretty easy to participate in status update on buildd.net:
Basically that's all.
Some small explanations to this:
- update=name - this updates the time in the DB on which the status is calculated (whether if it's down or not).
- name=name - you can use name= instead of update= in order to NOT update the times in the DB, f.e. when you just want to do the next command...
- reason=foobar - with that you can set the reason field in the DB with which you can signal why your buildd is down. Or you can advertise scheduled downtimes in advance like "work on power supply on Friday" or such.
- building=foobar - with this field you can display your currently building package. It makes most sense when used in conjunction with name=. When you want to erase the content of this field, you need to pass a whitespace as parameter.
An example for this are these two lines:
3-59/10 * * * * wget -q -O /dev/null "http://www.buildd.net/cgi/status.phtml?name=BUILDD&p=PASSWD&building="$(test -f build/build-progress && ps axww|grep -qs sbuild.*--dist\\=unstable && sed -ne 's/\: currently.*//p' < "build/build-progress") 2>&1 1>/dev/null || true
57 * * * * wget -q -O /dev/null "http://www.buildd.net/cgi/status.phtml?update=BUILDD&p=PASSWD&building="$(test -f build/build-progress && ps axww|grep -qs sbuild.*--dist\\=unstable && sed -ne 's/\: currently.*//p' < "build/build-progress") 2>&1 1>/dev/null || true
Or you just want to use the script update-buildd.net which has been written by Thimo Neubauer.
Thanks, Thimo, for your contribution!
Keep in mind to change the minutes for the updates and of course replace BUILDD and PASSWD with your corresponding settings.
Please don't abuse the reason and building abilities as short message method to display 'funny' things. That's not the intention of those methods.
When your are the first buildd of your arch, it is most likely that the whole arch is not yet listed on buildd.net, but that's not problem at all. Buildd.net lists only participating archs because it tries to give additional information to the developers f.e. such as downtime reasons or so. Therefore it is just a little prerequisite to have a participating buildd to get an arch listed on buildd.net.