Re: nightly snapshot for CURRENT ?

On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 7:17 PM Clay Daniels <clay.daniels.jr_at_gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Jun 9, 2020 at 2:48 PM Emmanuel Vadot <manu_at_bidouilliste.com> wrote:
>
> >
> >  Hello all,
> >
> >  I've just hit again something that I've hit (and probably others too)
> > often.
> >  If a change in base break some ports and it's snapshoted in the txz
> > available at download.freebsd.org, you need to wait a week for the next
> > tarball to be available.
> >  Since poudriere uses the tarball when you setup a jail it means that
> > the only solution you have is to recreate your jail by building it, and
> > since building world nowdays is very expensive that delay your work too
> > much.
> >  Would it be possible to generate the tarballs every day instead of
> > every week ? At least for tier-1 arches.
> >
> >  Cheers,
> >
> > --
> > Emmanuel Vadot <manu_at_bidouilliste.com> <manu_at_freebsd.org>
> > _______________________________________________
> >
>
> At first I thought you were referring to the weekly snapshots packaged as
> install images:
> https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/snapshots/ISO-IMAGES/13.0/
>
> But I think you are talking about the snapshots of each part, like base,
> kernel, ports. src, etc to use as a roll your own install like:
> https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/snapshots/arm64/13.0-CURRENT/
>

Yes, these are the parts he's talking about. My initial impression is
that it'd be nice if we could (somehow) leverage Jenkins artifacts [0]
to get even more frequent updates if we really needed to without
significantly impacting re_at_ -- that's a little more difficult, though,
because build breakage makes it hard to predict what the latest
snapshot you can actually grab is, if any. Perhaps a script that
creates a symlink to the 'last known functional across the board'
revision periodically...

[0] http://artifacts.ci.freebsd.org/snapshot/head/r361934/amd64/amd64/

> From my selfish perspective as a weekly installer of the regular Thursday
> image or iso of 13.0 Current, I would hate to lose the pre-rolled
> installer, and I think there are probably others like me. As long as you
> keep the weekly install snapshots, it will not affect folks like me. I must
> say that what you want to do is how NetBSD does their daily cent
> snapshots, and they do not even offer pre-rolled install images.
>
> But you are a real developer and I'm just a retired guy playing with his
> hobby, so go ahead and do what you think is best for you.
>

This was brought up in a public forum, you should probably feel free
to make non-obstructive comments like this to make sure a fairly
common need is represented. The (light-hearted?) self-deprecation near
the end of this makes me a bit uneasy- I certainly hope you didn't
feel like it was mandatory to acknowledge that he's a developer and
you're a hobbyist, because there's most assuredly more hobbyists (such
as myself) lurking with similar needs/desires. =-)

Thanks,

Kyle Evans