[Nix-dev] Set up a Sufficiently Powerful Build Farm

[Rob Vermaas]

Hi,

On Tue, Dec 22, 2015 at 2:23 PM, Daniel Peebles <pumpkingod at gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't have a good sense of how many the foundation can keep, but for now
> I'm not concerned about us having too many :) the more we get, the more
> responsive we'll be.
>
> As it stands, I think we have two (oldish) Darwin cores on Hydra today, so
> when my 4-core box arrives (assuming it works well) it should give us more
> than 3x the current power :) I paid $589 for it and another $55 for shipping
> from the US. Most of the ones for sale on eBay are the newer (but not
> newest) generation and are thus a bit more expensive than the one I got.
>
> I think we'd be in a reasonably comfortable place if we could get 3 or 4
> more of those boxes, but if we could get more I obviously wouldn't complain.
>
> I'd love for us to have Darwin be a nearly first-class citizen of nixpkgs,
> but potential adopters (and thus contributors) are going to be turned off if
> they need to recompile the world if they get anywhere near master.

Thanks to Dan for arranging an extra (powerful) Mac Mini and donating
it to the Foundation!

Additionally, in the next few weeks, the NixOS Foundation will buy 2
more Mac Mini's, which, together with Dan's Mac Mini and the existing
one, should improve our Darwin build times significantly. We will look
for further expansion of the Mac fleet once we get more information on
the effects of the additional machines.

Cheers,
Rob