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  • From: Andrew <afrayedknot AT thefrayedknot.armory.com>
  • To: sm-users AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Users] Questions about Sourcemage.
  • Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2004 14:27:58 -0800



Why yes, more machines would be helpful!
I have three machines running prometheus.
The basic strategy is to have them all freshly installed with a few
added packages. Alternatively you can fence one or more promethei inside
uml jails.

on my boxes I add postfix (email) prometheus (which adds tcl, expect,
bugcli, and some perl modules), optionally I add xfree86 or xfree86-libs.

My machines are all 300-400 mhz, two are dual processor units.
In terms of different hardware, the more the merrier IMO, I've uncovered
at least one bug by compiling as a non i686 machine. Originally I had
hoped to run this on other architectures (ppc, sparc) so we could have
a fighting chance of making sourcemage work on other archs. I havent
encountered too many issues with smp vs non-smp, but its always good to
try anyway.

In terms of ram, the more the better, one machine has 512, the others
have about 128. Basically more ram == more file system cache ==
less time wasted on disk IO
In terms of hard drive space, I've been running a machine just fine with
3gb.

In order to speed things up I use a shared ccache directory, and a shared
/var/spool/sorcery. (I designated my desktop machine to be an NFS server).
ccache helps a lot, since a number of things get recompiled often (xfree,
jpeg, qt-x11)

I also added distcc which is helpful because it can distribute the load
of compilation around. Prometheus goes through a phase each test where it
computes md5sums of all the files, and thus has lots of spare cpu
cycles. If you feel like dabling in openmosix, this can also help even
the load.

In terms of installing prometheus, get the latest test/stable tarball,
and cast prometheus.
Then override any of the variables in /etc/pm-config in
/etc/prometheus/pm-config.
mine looks kinda like this:
BUGZILLA_USER=<bugzilla username>
export BUGCLI_PASSWORD=<bugzilla password>
REPORT_BUGZILLA=yes
GRIMOIRE=test
DO_UPDATES=no
export PAGER=cat
REPORT_ADDRESS=prometheus AT t.armory.com
PRUNE_LOCAL="/boot /etc/xml /var/lib/nfs /etc/exports"

If you want to submit bugs you'll have to override your bugzilla user
name and password. I also specify some extra files to prune (ignore any
and all changes to) in PRUNE_LOCAL (you can also put things like
.*postfix.* in there, its a regexp that eventually gets passed to find).

then run pm-setup (answer y to the question it gives you).
it'll then make a backup of your system to /prometheus/image
and put a bunch of other stuff in /prometheus, every time you do a change
to something not PRUNE'd you'll need to re-run this as prometheus has
no way of distinguishing changes you make and changes that a spell made.

After that make sure everything works right:
pm-test once tree

That will cast tree, then do a bunch of time consuming checks on your
systems to make sure everything is 'okay'. (this is more important for
bigger spells). You'll want to run
pm-report-all
this will make a report out of what just happened, and if you have email
set up you'll get a prometheus success email, which will contain a (mostly
useless) report of what went right.

If all goes well you should be good to go.
I've been running pm-test section <section name> <bugzilla equivalent section
name>
for lots of sections, then bugs get submitted under the right section
so re-assigning them is easier.

Im a little short on time so improving this functionality hasn't happened yet
:(
If you feel like testing some sections I've already done
ham, perl-cpan, utils, doc, kde, xfce, printer, gnome2-apps, disk,
chat-irc and chat-im.

Although, feel free to hit up the gnome sections again. Let me know what
sections you want to do and I'll avoid doing them.

(more random notes follow)
Also, after each section finishes what I've been doing is running pm-update
This then goes and looks for spell changes to things it knows have broken,
and then removes them from its list of things to ignore. Spells that
are problematic get ignored, and their dependancies get ignored too.

Things that are pulled off that list are stuck in
/prometheus/lists/removed.lst
you can pm-test list /prometheus/lists/removed.lst
to test that stuff out.
Also sometimes one spell fails because of a dependency, this makes
some problems come up, spells that are skipped for that reason end up
in skipped.lst, which is also entertaining to retry from time to time,
(copy it elsewhere first though). And one last big annoyance that
im thinking of a way to fix: sometimes when you're casting foo, its
dependency bar fails, and then foo subsequently fails, then both foo and
bar are marked as problematic. But on a pm-update only bar is changed
and foo remains on the list. There isn't really anything to help with that
atm.
I just periodically go through problems.lst and cull things

Theres also a winners.lst and a losers.lst (I have the summary of my
winners.lst's at ftp://t.armory.com/spell-stats)

And finally (!) theres a wiki page for prometheus, which is slightly
out of date but still relevent.

Email me (off list perhaps) if you have any questions/comments/concerns
or to let me know what you're going to test out. Or just find me on
#sourcemage (nick afrayedknot)

Sorry for the long email, but I hope that is enough to get you all the
way through the process.

-Andrew

>
> 4. I have also heard about a system called "prometheus", it is supposed to
> test the spells by casting them a multiple of times. Do you need a extra
> (a few) machines to help in this?
>
> 4a. What are the system requirements for running the prometheus system?
> I'm looking for HD space, RAM needed, and min. ideal proccessor speed.
>
> 4b. I have a machine here that has 4 proccessors running Sourcemage, would
> it help to test the spells and identify which ones can be saftly cast with
> a SMP machine? I have noticed that there is a warning about it in
> sorcery, it might be useful to have the spell have a tag that allows it to
> be cast
> with a SMP machine.
>
> Probley should have split this into multiple e-mails but its here now.
>
> Have Fun!
> Chuck Hall
>
> _______________________________________________
> SM-Users mailing list
> SM-Users AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/sm-users

--
________________________________________________________________________
|Andrew D. Stitt | astitt AT sourcemage.org |
|irc: afrayedknot | afrayedknot AT t.armory.com |
|aim: thefrayedknot or iteratorplusplus | |
|Grimoire Guru ham/smgl, Porting Team Lead | ftp://t.armory.com |
|Author and Maintainer of Prometheus | |
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