Re: Windows, OS X

[Tristan Van Berkom <tristan vanberkom codethink co uk>]

On Tue, 2018-05-29 at 15:21 +0200, Sander Striker wrote:
> Hi,
>
> First let me reiterate the goals of the proposal for Remote Execution
> (https://mail.gnome.org/archives/buildstream-list/2018-
> April/msg00006.html):
>
> > Remote execution enables BuildStream to run build jobs in a
> distributed network instead of on the local machine. This allows
> massive speedups when a powerful cluster of servers is available.
> > Besides speeding up builds, a goal is also to allow running builds
> on workers that use a different execution environment, e.g., a
> different operating system or ISA.
> > The goal is not to offload a complete BuildStream session to a
> remote system. BuildStream will still run locally and dispatch
> individual build jobs for elements with the existing pipeline.
>
> Even when the target platform is Linux, there is a large set of
> developers on either OS X or Windows [laptops].   As we are
> considering different execution environments on workers, we can also
> start considering supporting BuildStream natively in these
> environments.
> Assuming the scope to be limited to remote execution only for now,
> then I think we should aim to support OS X and Windows, but limited
> to Windows + WSL (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/about)
> .
> Once the remote execution sandbox backend is in place, I think the
> complexity will not be too bad.  But curious to here of any pitfalls.

So there are a few separate things here:

  * Different execution environments, to be available with
    remote execution.

  * Guaranteed linux/abi execution environment, to be virtualized
    on a variety of platforms.

  * Portable BuildStream frontend/core.

All of these things desirable...

I think that WSL is interesting for people building linux but using a
windows laptop to do so, less interesting with remote execution where
you might as well have a real linux runner (rather I'd very much like
to use a native windows sandbox remotely, while running BuildStream on
my linux laptop).

Still, if we were to have a portable BuildStream frontend which runs on
windows to build a linux firmware, then implementing a WSL build
sandbox would be a good starting place.

Cheers,
    -Tristan