Hacki informed me that server which hosts the official autobuild on mighty-hoernsche.de is being shut down in the next month or so.
He is not interested in setting up and supporting a new server, which is quite understandable given that he hasn't been much involved in the project for many years. He did offer to redirect the domain if we set up a new one.
I can put something together if needed, but if anyone else (with a history of involvement in the community) is interested in hosting and maintaining it, please post here.
Some notes on requirements:
* People with CHDK commit access should have a way of viewing build logs
* Little other interaction from developers is required. The fi2.inc occasionally needs to be updated, but given the cameras CHDK can possibly support, there should be few if any updates in the future
* The build process inherently allows anyone with CHDK commit access to execute code on the autobuild server, though it would be recorded in commit history
* While the bandwidth / storage requirements are modest, IIRC hacki has noted in the past that some crawlers liked to repeatedly download every zip
* It's possible that Canon will someday get mad and send lawyers after whoever hosts it, though given that we aren't likely to ever support anything after digic 7, I'd suspect the odds are going down
* AFAIK the existing autobuild was on a cron job which checked for new reversions every 15 minutes. I believe assembla does have the capability to call external URLs on commit, but given their general flakiness over the last few years, the time based approach is probably better
My thoughts on implementation:
* I would be tempted to make an autobuild variant of the
docker build environment (or a similar container platform), with the binaries uploaded to something that servers static files (like s3)
* This should make it easy to host, and keep server costs minimal. For storage, I think a full batch build is something like 400 MB.
* Rather than generating an html table in the autobuild, I could consider making the autobuild just publish JSON file, which would allow the download UI to be maintained separately, and would also be easily usable by installer tools (but more on that below).
* Regarding download pages, msl pointed me to the chdkde autobuild page at
https://chdkde.akalab.de/, which has a javascript (client side only) solution for identifying the camera from exif. This and the list box selection UI seems like an improvement over a giant table.
* If a build fails, the previous build should be kept, rather than presenting broken build page.
* I'd personally be tempted to drop support for the "small" zips.
Installer tool considerations:
Stick and CHIMP presumably expect to parse the HTML table on mighty-hoernsche.de. I don't know how much interest
@zeno and
@dmitrys have in updating these tools, but it would be nice to keep them working.
