The OpenEmbedd project kindly hosted at handeld.org is slowly gaining a Quality Assurance architecture. The key part of this infrastructure is a Tinderbox – probably known from the Mozilla project.
Koen and me spent and still spend time on setting the tinderbox up. Tinderbox is written in perl and specially for me this is hard to understand but I could not find anything else that promises the same features as tinderbox.

A Tinderbox links multiple sources of data together and relates them so we can interpret the results. Possible sources are checkins into our SCM (monotone or subversion), our Bug Databases, builds on different systems with different configurations and additional checks.

Tinderclients provide build results and progress by mail, thanks to the flexibility of OpenEmbedded every oe build can function as a tinderclient with just six lines in your local.conf. The tinderclient functionality is implemented as bbclass and monitors the build.
Once our basic setup is done we will ask for you functioning as tinderclients. Your duty will be to run regular builds with a configuration you are interested in.

For example could the familiar people run bootstrap-image for h3900 regulary and monitor regressions.

Besides the buildtests we will do, we plan to run the bittest module as well. Bittest features tests to see if upstream sourcecode still exists, patches apply… These tests are more memory and bandwidth invasive and we need people to run these for us.

First results can be found here and we’re extending the infrastructure. What we did already

• install two tinderbox2 from mozilla/webtools/tinderbox2
• write a VC_svn.pm to track svn using the SVN perl bindings
• fight with ownership of the files until tinder.cgi worked right
• setup a dummy mail account create fetchmail and procmailrc rules to process mails and bug-reports
• make tinderclient.bbclass work with INHERIT += “tinderclient” you can be a tinderclient already. So every build can be part of our infrastructure

But we have much more things todo… but this will be covered tomorrow. I hope koen progresses on his blog better and mails oe AT handhelds.org

Drop us a note if you need help setting a tinderbox, are interested in our configuration or in our VC_svn.pm.