[[!template id=project

title="Web interface for pbulk"

contact="""
[tech-pkg](mailto:tech-pkg@NetBSD.org)
"""

category="pkgsrc"
difficulty="medium"

description="""
To create large sets of binary packages, pkgsrc uses the pbulk tool.

pbulk is designed to build packages in bulk in a chroot sandbox (which
may be based on an older NetBSD release, a 32-bit release on a 64-bit
machine, or similar).

However, managing multiple pbulk installations on a single machine
can quickly become unwieldy.

It would be nice to have a web frontend for managing pbulk, restarting
builds, creating new build sandboxes based on different NetBSD versions
and package sets, etc.

For an example of a typical high-performance pbulk setup used
on "large" hardware, see
[Nia's pbulk scripts](https://github.com/alarixnia/bulkbuild-scripts).
Notably, these include chroot management and can be used to build
packages for multiple NetBSD (and pkgsrc) versions simultaneously 
by using different "base directories".

- A management tool should support parallel pbulk across many chroots,
but should also easily allow simultaneous builds for different NetBSD
versions on the same machine.
- It should be possible to schedule builds for later, somewhat
like Jenkins.
- There should be some kind of access management system.
- pbulk creates status directories, it would be useful to present as
much data from them as possible, as well as information on system
resource usage (e.g. to find any stuck processes and monitor
hardware health).
- It should be possible for users to "kick" the builds (to quickly
restart them, kill "stuck" processes, and so on).
- It should be possible to schedule builds for upload after manual
review of the reports, resulting in an rsync from a local staging
directory to ftp.netbsd.org.
- It should be usable "over a morning coffee".
- For bonus points, it should be easily installable from pkgsrc,
  ideally with an RC script.
- For bonus points, integrate well with the NetBSD base system
tools (e.g. bozohttpd).
"""
]]
[[!tag gsoc350h]]