Distro under continuous integration

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Hi!

A long-overdue announcement...

Some months ago, Nikita and I asked the FSF sysadmins for a (virtual)
machine to host a Hydra instance.  They offered us a 4-core VM (I
think?), known as hydra.gnu.org.  Nikita installed Nix and Hydra, and I
finished the setup of Hydra.  There were various issues needing to be
addressed in Hydra’s support for Guix[*].

Anyway, if you go to <http://hydra.gnu.org/jobset/gnu/master>, you’ll
see the packages for ‘master’, and at
<http://hydra.gnu.org/jobset/gnu/core-updates> you’ll see the packages
for ‘core-updates’.

There are still glitches here and there on the web UI and setup.  You’re
welcome to report them and help fix them.

Ludo’.

[*] My initial plan was to use it both for continuous integration (CI)
    of Guix itself (that is, running autoreconf && make dist &&
    ./configure && make check && make install of Guix), and CI of the
    distro.

    In that plan, CI of Guix itself would be done with Nix (via the
    release.nix file that we have), whereas CI of the distro would be
    done with Guix (the hydra.scm file).  But Guix’s distro doesn’t need
    /bin/sh in its chroot, whereas Nixpkgs does, and a single daemon
    cannot handle both setups.  So we’d have had to either run our
    builds in a chroot that includes /bin and more, at the risk of
    introducing impurities and not catching other errors, or we’d have
    been unable to build Guix itself.

    The solution I ended up with was to rely on a pre-installed version
    of Guix for bootstrapping:
    https://github.com/NixOS/hydra/commit/f3aa48978e1f0922094f159c762bf8664ae40ed2

    (Anyone willing to rewrite Hydra in Guile?  :-))