In line with the email thread and email title, The purpose of this email is to start a collaboration on how best we can optimize Salsa CI by migrating from using
dpkg-buildpackage to
sbuild for building packages. The reason is to reduce the build time it may take for testing packages. Other reasons are referenced in
this MR's description.
So far there has been a lot of progress as reflected in the
diffs. However. One major block that we are having is integrating sbuild with ccache. The pipeline generally has 3 stages;
- Images - This creates reusable docker containers using these Dockerfiles that are stored in GitLab to be reused anytime a job is called. these images need to be built and availed so that the build time is reduced.
- Build - This fetches the necessary upstream resources for a particular package and uses builds the package depending on the host, architecture and build environment variables. Currently, this process is using dpkg-buildpackage and this is the section we want to integrate with sbuild
- Clean - This cleans up the used images for further use.
I would have been verbose in my here but I have tried to provide the necessary links and a basic explanation of what the scenario is.
I hope to collect perspectives and also answer some questions where I can.
Regards,
Enock