Re: Solstice infrastructure hackathon

[Mathieu Othacehe <othacehe@gnu.org>]

Hello,

> That's not to say there's not something to be gained by upgrading the
> bayfront hardware, some SSD storage would be ideal to speed up the
> coordinator and builds.

While we are talking infrastructure, a short digression on the current
situation. The Berlin build farm is providing substitutes for all
branches and development branches. It is providing system images that
are made available on the Guix website, on Gnome Boxes and probably
elsewhere.

It is giving a frequent status on the system tests. It is also checking
that all our sources are available and feeding the Disarchive
database. When this build farm is experiencing troubles, all those
important services are suspended or limited.

As you may know, Berlin is also experiencing storage issues that will
soon be really problematic. Having Bordeaux as another build farm
monopolizing resources and requiring new hardware while maintaining
Berlin is already a huge burden seems untenable to me.

I personally think that having Bordeaux as an alternative build farm,
running alternative software is a wrong direction for the project. I
would personally prefer to put a stop to that situation.

We should clearly host some services such as the Guix website on
Berlin & Bordeaux to bring some redundancy. However, as far as
substitutes building is concerned, redundancy is premature when
maintaining a single system, with our limited human and hardware
resources, proves to be so complex.

What do other people think?

Thanks,

Mathieu