This is a great and easy way to contribute to the VL development. Buildslaves can be ran on your real hardware or in a virtualbox VM. If you want to run it on real hardware, you'll need to have vlocity 7.0 (vectorlinux 64-bit) running, because it has all the tools we need there with very little additions. If you run any other OS as your primary OS (even windows) I have a virtualbox image that you can import into virtualbox with everything in it, all you should need to do is launch it.
Like vec said, this has been a big step for us. Has eliminated I would say about 80% of the leg work that has to be done for preparing each release.
A few of us are already running build slaves out of our boxes. See listing here
http://vlcore.vectorlinux.com/buildbot/buildslavesThe way it works is, when a package is requested, a slave is picked at random to build the package and upload it to the repos. So, adding more slaves means that more packages can be built simultaneously and if one of the current slaves were to go offline for maintenance, the development would still continue in the others.
Ovbiously, the more slaves we have, the lighter the load will be for every one of them.
We can set limits to the bandwidth the slave will use for uploads and downloads so that it wont flood your net connection.
Anyone interested is contributing bandwidth and horsepower to build packages, please post here. We do appreciate every bit of help we can get.
Think of it like this. Its a way to become a packager, without having to learn how to package
So, if you have a box that runs 24/7 because you run a file server or something out of it, how about setting up a slave there?
