pterjan's diary

  Success

In November 2012 I started running an irregular rebuild of all Mageia packages on x86_64, discarding the built packages, to just detect build breakages.

At first it was running a few times a month, now once a week, except before releases where I run it twice a week.

For the first attempt, on 2012-11-28, we had 10949 packages and 1104 failed to build (10%), by the time of the second attempt 3 weeks later we were down to 6.7% of build failures.

Since then, the distribution has been growing and this has helped detecting packages that needs to be fixed early, really helping for the mass rebuild of each release.

• Mageia 3 was released on 2013-05-01 with 133 failures out of 11008 (1.2%), most of them being random failures due to the use of make -jN.
• Mageia 4 was released on 2014-02-01 with 24 failures out of 11739 (0.2%)
• Mageia 5 was released on 2015-06-20 with 42 failures out of 12455 (0.2%)
• Mageia 6 is going to be released on 2017-07-XX with 0 failures out of 13650 (0%)!

For those interested in the technical details, I am using iurt (the same as we use on Mageia build system) to rebuild everything, creating a new chroot for each package.

I build 16 packages at once, with -j4, on a virtual machine having 32 cores and 200G ram which I use as tmpfs for the builds.

A full rebuild takes about 20 hours.