Re: Continuous build tool: we've got a Hydra jobset

[Rob Mahurin]

On Wed, Aug 04, 2010 at 08:26:24AM -0500, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
> On 3 August 2010 19:11, Ben Abbott <address@hidden> wrote:
> >
> > I'm not familiar with what you refer to when you wrote "I managed
> > to install nix". Can you explain?
> 
> This, I suppose:
> 
>      http://nixos.org/
> 
> Hm, this is interesting. It looks like you need to learn a functional
> programming language in order to setup the Mac OS X build. Let me save
> you a few clicks for finding the manual:
> 
>      http://hydra.nixos.org/build/521872/download/1/manual/

Yes, that's what I meant.  I think a more permanent way to reach the
manual may be via 

        http://hydra.nixos.org/release/nix/nix-0.15

If I understand correctly, the "hydra" continuous build system uses
the "nix" package manager to keep track of the which mercurial
revisions it has or has not built.  But it's a little more
sophisticated than that, because nix also identifies the versions used
for every dependency (the whole "dependency graph").  Seems like a
nice tool for a project like octave, which requires lots of external
software to be built correctly and from the right version and
installed in the right place.

Unfortunately the current stumbling block is that it's hard to get
gfortran working on MacOS.  (Which is the same conclusion I come to
reading the link in Ben's instructions to
http://r.research.att.com/tools/ : the takeaway seems to be "use this
gfortran binary we made, or try it yourself, but don't say we didn't
warn you it's tricky.")  I suspect that gfortan must be available
using the nix package manager on MacOS before the automatic builds
described at http://hydra.nixos.org/jobset/gnu/octave-default begin to
succeed on Darwin.  There are other failed dependencies there, too.

It seems like there is a lot of non-Octave work to be done to get the
Octave autobuild to work for MacOS.  

Cheers,
Rob