freebsd-ports/Tools/portbuild/README

This is the parallelized package building system.  Many thanks to
Steve Price for helping me put this together.

                                                   - Satoshi

In the following, ${branch} is either "2.2" or "3.0" depending on
which packages you intend to build.

Note that this system is still under development.  It will require a
substantial amount of effort to set up initially, and the following is
probably missing a lot of stuff.  Please let me know of any warts you
find.

 (1) One of the machines are to be designated as the "master".  It is
     defined in the portbuild script.  There is also a "buildroot"
     directory where everything should reside on the master machine.
     It is defined in ports/Makefile and the portbuild script.  Copy
     everything under this directory there and make necessary changes.

 (2) On the master, check out the ports tree under
     ${buildroot}/usr/ports, the appropriate source tree under
     ${buildroot}/${branch}/src and the doc tree under
     ${buildroot}/usr/opt/doc.  These directories have to be NFS
     exported to the build machines.  (Hint: you should probably add
     "-alldirs" to /etc/exports.)

 (3) Setup ssh for root between the build machines and the master.  It 
     has to work in both directions.

 (4) Put the list of machines you have in "mlist".  There is a sample
     provided in this directory.  Each line should have two entries,
     "hostname" and "power".  The "hostname" is self-explanatory; the
     "power" entry generally describes how many compilations that
     machine can run in parallel.  This number is used by the checkmachines
     script to work out which machines should be handed new jobs, by
     dividing the number of running jobs on the client by its weight and
     taking the integer part, and choosing all clients with minimal value.
     Because it takes the integer value this algorithm will select machines
     with loads in a certain range, not just the single least loaded machine.

     Note that you can put the master here as well, but our experience 
     is that our NFS is likely to act up when the master is too busy.
     Even with a two-processor P6-200, we had to refrain from running
     any compilations on the master to get NFS to work reliably.

 (5) Go to ${branch}/bindist and follow the instructions in the README
     files there to create the bindist tarball.

 (6) Generate an XFree86 tarball in ports/x11/XFree86.  Use
     PLIST.stripped to create a smaller version.  (You can use it by
     setting 'PLIST=${PKGDIR}/PLIST.stripped'.)  Put it in
     ${branch}/tarballs.

 (7) If you have Motif, generate a Motif tarball by using
     ports/x11-toolkits/Motif-dummy.  Put it in ${branch}/tarballs.

 (8) Copy ${branch}/tarballs and ${buildroot}/portbuild to same
     directories on the build machines.  Create a directory
     ${branch}/chroot on the build machines.

 (9) Create the directory ${buildroot}/{distfiles,loads},
     ${branch}/{errors,logs} and ${branch}/packages/All on the master.
     Copy the XFree86 and Motif tarballs to the latter directory.

(10) Run the "reportload" script on the build machines in the
     background (you can put reportload.sh in /usr/local/etc/rc.d to
     run it automatically upon reboot), and then run the
     "checkmachines" script on the master, again in the background.
     This will check all the machines listed in "mlist" periodically
     and print the list of least-loaded machines to "ulist".

(11) Run the "makeduds" script at ${buildroot}/usr/ports.  The one
     supplied is for building 2.2 packages on a 3.0 machines.  For
     3.0, you can replace it with just two lines:

     unset DISPLAY
     PARALLEL_PACKAGE_BUILD=t make ignorelist ECHO_MSG=true > ../../3.0/duds

(12) Run the "makeindex" script at ${buildroot}/usr/ports.  The one
     supplied is for building 2.2 packages on a 3.0 machines.  For
     3.0, you can replace it with just one line:

     PORTSDIR=$(pwd) PARALLEL_PACKAGE_BUILD=t make index

(13) Run "make parallel > ../../${branch}/Makefile" in
     ${buildroot}/usr/ports to generate the Makefile.

(14) Go to ${branch}/packages/All on the master and type "make -k
     -j<whatever> -f ../../Makefile &".  Then wait. :)

(15) Note that the new scheme will not clean up the chroot dirs under
     ${buildroot}/${branch}/chroot on the build machines, but will
     instead reuse them during the course of the build.  Make sure you
     delete them all when your bindist.tar changes.