Poor Man’s Build Farm

Build farms are kinda cool, I deal with one at work. Unfortunately, it’s large, complicated, and very task specific. I did a quick google search, and didn’t find much in alternatives. I’d really like a system which:

• Has an HTTP interface for submitting jobs, getting results, etc
• Allows for any project to be built providing it has a makefile
• Automatic and dynamic resource management
• Relatively simple in implementation usage

The resource management is probably the most curious. Say I’m at a lab computer at school, and I want to use that as a build machine, I would like to be able to run a daemon, which given the right server address and password, will become avilable in the build menu when you submit a job.

There are security problems though. How do you prevent unauthorized users from submitting malicous code? You really can’t, unless you have trusted users. Big companies like SourceForge can afford to create build farms, and probably run the compile in a chrooted environment, but if the disk gets hosed, so what? Just reimage the disk and you’re good to go. Obviously with such distributed systems that really is more of a peer system, that isn’t possible. For example, my own personal laptop could become a build machine.

Of course, ultimately the other option is tarballing the source and emailing it around and getting people to test it on their machines, but that might not that be that easy.

Just a thought.