MarcusCom Tinderbox

What is Tinderbox

Tinderbox is a package building system for FreeBSD ports, based on official Portbuild scripts used on pointyhat building cluster. Tinderbox was written by Joe Marcus Clarke.

You can define multiple jails (base system versions) and multiple portstrees. The combination of jail and portstree is called a build. A Tinderbox jail is not what is understood as a jail in FreeBSD, it is in fact a given world in a chroot. Tinderbox supports automatic tracking of dependencies and only rebuilds packages that changed since last run. Tinderbox has support for email notification of failed builds. Tinderbox also integrates well with ccache.

Tinderbox is designed to easily provide package sets of ports you need, for platforms and architectures you need. Tinderbox is also excellent tool for testing new ports and port upgrades, especially for testing dependencies and packing lists. It's also useful for testing ports on various releases of FreeBSD, since you can run FreeBSD 4.X world as a jail on FreeBSD 5.X/6.X host.

Tinderbox is written in Perl, uses MySQL or PostgreSQL as data storage and PHP for optional web front-end. You need the DBD::Mysql (or DBD::Pg for Postgres) perl module, MySQL 4.1 or newer or PostgreSQL 7.4 or newer, PHP with php4-mysql (php4-pgsql for Postgres) extension and PEAR::DB classes installed.

Mailing list about Tinderbox (archives). Feel free to subscribe.

See the Tinderbox README (en español) for detailed instructions on setting up and using Tinderbox.

Download

tinderbox-2.4.2.tar.gz (2007-12-18) Bug fix release:

• Add support for FreeBSD 8.X.
• Fix a database query bug.
• Ensure the .env files are properly read and export when building the Makefile and database entries.
• Use the C locale when calculating build times.
• Do not die if a Build's log directory is missing when running tbcleanup.

This release comes with a rawenv change, so make sure you copy rawenv.dist to rawenv to get the latest variables.

This release would not have been possible without the patches and testing from Ade Lovett, Wesley Shields, Boris Samorodov, and Alexander Logvinov.

tinderbox-2.4.1.tar.gz (2007-09-03) Bug fix release:

• Sync with the latest applicable pointyhat changes. This includes extraneous UID and GID checking.
• Support for creating per-Jail make.conf and src.conf files is supported. These files should live in ${tb}/jails/JAIL, and are used for the Jail builds. You will still need to use Hooks to populate custom make.conf files in your Builds.
• Sorting now works properly in the www-exp frontend.
• Hooks that contain arguments with spaces can now be properly executed.
• Various other bug fixes have gone in as well.

This release would not have been possible without the contributions by Dmitriy Kirhlarov and Alexander Logvinov (and, of course, pointyhat and Kris).

tinderbox-2.4.0.tar.gz (2007-07-18) New feature release:

• Hooks : A hook is a "callout" which gives Tinderbox the ability to run custom code at pre-determined times. For example, you can establish a Hook to run just before a Port is built, after a Build is extracted, before a PortsTree is updated, etc. Pre-condition hooks can even cause an operation to terminate if so desired. The new commands to manipulate Hooks are tc listHooks and tc updateHookCmd.
• OPTIONS processing : If you enable OPTIONS support in Tinderbox, you can have tc addPort automatically prompt you to configure OPTIONS. Just run tc addPort with the new -o argument, and you will be prompted with the usual dialog(1) screen to configure OPTIONS. OPTIONS configuration will happen recursively if the -r argument is specified, and non-recursively otherwise.
• Failed dependents tracking : If a port fails to build, it will update the datastore for all of its dependents so that they will be reported as pseudo-failed. That is, they will have a unique appearance in the www-exp frontend to indicate that they were not built because a dependency failed.
• Port build duration is tracked and an estimated time to completion is now shown in the www-exp frontend. Here is an example.
• The /usr/X11R6 symlink is now ignored and not treated as a leftover.
• The Tinderbox www-exp index page informs users that cookies are required to use Tinderbox.

Note: This release comes with a pretty hefty schema change, so one must run upgrade.sh to add the new schema elements.

This release would not be possible without the contributions and feedback from Edwin Groothius, Tom Mclaughlin, Diane Bruce, Pav Lucistnik, Florent Thoumie, Martin Wilke and Alexander Logvinov.

tinderbox-2.3.6.tar.gz (2007-05-19) Bug fix release:

This release address the change of X11BASE from /usr/X11R6 to /usr/local. A few other bugfixes are also included. All users are encouraged to upgrade. When you do, you will have to manually copy rawenv.dist to rawenv to get the X11BASE change to take effect.

tinderbox-2.3.5.tar.gz (2007-02-26) Bug fix and new feature release:

• No longer disable malloc debugging in Jails (only affects -CURRENT Jails by default).
• Sync with the new -CURRENT mount commands.
• Properly support alternate LOCALBASE and X11BASE values throughout the build process.
• Fix a bug where uninitialized variables might be referenced in portbuild.
• Sync with pointyhat to allow for longer build executions and larger file sizes.
• Sync the log file analysis code with pointyhat to provide better hints as to why failures are occurring.
• Make sure the environment is clean when generating Makefiles.
• Handle the upcoming merged mtree structure.
• Handle the upcoming fontconfig 2.4 upgrade.
• Fix a bug where stale Build Ports could cause tinderd to fail.

Note: this release includes a micro dsversion bump, so you must run the upgrade.sh to ensure your database static data is up-to-date.

The Tinderbox team would like to thank Diane Bruce, Tim Bishop, Maxime Henrion (mux), Alexander Logvinov, and Florent Thoumie (flz) for their contributions to this release.

tinderbox-2.3.4.tar.gz (2006-11-28) Bug fix and new feature release:

• A performance bug with tbcleanup that was introduced in 2.3.3 has been fixed.
• The portbuild environment is now scrubbed to prevent pollution. This greatly helps in producing the same packages as pointyhat.
• The HOME environment variable is initialized to /root to fix certain false positive leftover problems.
• If a port fails to build, the Build is reinitialized before the next port build is started (unless -noclean is passed to tinderbuild) to prevent pollution.
• All the new failure patterns have been merged from pointyhat. This will produce much more accurate failure analysis.
• A new feature has been added to support introducing custom OPTIONS into port builds. Consult the README for more details.
• With the start of Xorg 7.x merge testing, port problems are being found due to the move to LOCALBASE. Therefore, Tinderbox needs an easy way to set non-standard LOCALBASE and X11BASE. This has been addressed in 2.3.4. To make use of this feature you must either copy rawenv.dist to rawenv, or add LOCALBASE and X11BASE variables to your rawenv file. For example:

• LOCALBASE=/usr/local
  X11BASE=/usr/X11R6
  

  When you want to run a build with non-standard LOCALBASE and/or X11BASE paths, just change rawenv, then start your build.

Note: this release includes a micro dsversion bump, so you must run the upgrade.sh to ensure your database static data is up-to-date.

The Tinderbox team would like to thank Marcus Alves Grando (mnag), Alexander Nedotsukov (bland), Erwin Lancing (erwin), and Pav Lucistnik (pav) for their input on this release.

tinderbox-2.3.3.tar.gz (2006-10-28) Bug fix release:

• Dependencies on Perl modules that are found in Perl 5.8.8 have been removed.
• The GConf hacks have been modified to account for the GNOME move from X11BASE to LOCALBASE.
• Support for using csup (if present) instead of cvsup has been added.
• The create script no longer matches on substrings of Tinderbox object names.
• The maximum file size limit has been increased from 300 MB to 600 MB to account for newer versions of OpenOffice.org.
• The buggy concurrent locking code for distfile caching in portbuild has been replaced with a more reliable implementation using lockf.
• Emails for ports not in the datastore now contain the correct log file name.
• Emails sent for a Postgres-backed Tinderbox now contain the correct log file name.
• tb cleanup now mounts portstrees before performing the cleanup operation.
• A bug where the -r flag was not being correctly passed to mount(8) has been fixed.
• More Postgres incompatibilities have been fixed.

Contributors to this release were Tom McLaughlin (tmclaugh), Oliver Lehmann (oliver), Boris Samorodov <bsam at ipt.ru>, and Erwin Lansing (erwin).

tinderbox-2.3.2.tar.gz (2006-07-04) Bug fix an minor feature release:

• Documentation has been added for the various .env files.
• The build process has been brought in closer sync with pointyhat.
• Overall dependency handling has been improved.
• tc addPort now properly updates ports that already exist in the datastore.
• tc tbcleanup does a better job of cleaning up.
• Support has been added for custom cvsweb URLs.
• Various grammar problems have been fixed.

Contributors to this release are Aaron Dalton (aaron), Shaun Amott (shaun), Oliver Lehmann (oliver), Ade Lovett (ade), and Pav Lucistnik (pav).

tinderbox-2.3.1.tar.gz (2006-04-22) Bug fix and minor feature release:

• Fix a bug in PHP 4 that caused dates to contain negative numbers (www-exp frontend only).
• Import the latest pointyhat build code so that the build process is now more pedantic.
• Fix a bug where an alternate cvsup program could not be successfully specified.
• Make leftover detection more robust.
• Other minor debugs have been fixed.

Besides the great effort by Tinderbox committers, the Tinderbox team would like to start thanking contributors to the various releases. First, we would like to acknowledge Edwin Groothuis who contributed a great deal to previous releases, especially to the www-exp frontend.

Contributors to this release were Andreas Kohn <andreas at syndrom23.de> and Ion-Mihai Tetcu <itetcu at people.tecnik93.com>.

tinderbox-2.3.0.tar.gz (2006-02-04) Bug fix and new feature release:

• Support for the X.Org 6.9.0 mtree layout has been added.
• A message is now printed to the user once tinderbuild enters its cleanup phase. This should hopefully prevent people from hitting Control+C too much, and causing an incomplete cleanup.
• Many Postgres incompatibilities have been fixed.
• The Latest Builds page is now auto-refreshed every 15 seconds while there is an active build, and every 5 minutes when no build is running (www-exp front-end only).
• You can now sort the Build Ports columns (www-exp front-end only).
• The duration of a port build is now displayed via the web (www-exp front-end only).
• More directories (e.g. /usr/local/www) are now checked for leftovers.
• Alternate cvsup programs (e.g. csup) can now be specified for updating Jails and PortsTrees.
• Various other bugs have been fixed.

tinderbox-2.2.1.tar.gz (2005-12-24) Bug fix release:

• Fix a bug where linprocfs was being unmounted by linux_base thus causing Java ports to fail.
• Fix a bug that cause enterbuild to report that the given Build did not exist.
• Increase filesize limit to 300 MB to accommodate OpenOffice distfiles.

tinderbox-2.2.0.tar.gz (2005-12-09) Bug fix and feature release:

• Tinderbox now provides reasons why a port build may have failed, and these reasons can be displayed using the www-exp frontend. A new -nolog option was added to tinderbuild to turn this feature off.
• There is a new -onceonly option to tinderbuild that disables the phase 2 tinderbuild pass.
• A new -trybroken flag was added to tinderbuild to build ports that are marked BROKEN.
• A new -jobs flag was added to tinderbuild to control how many parallel make jobs are spawned during a build.
• Ports that are marked as IGNORE (or otherwise duds) are now properly displayed as such in the www-exp frontend.
• A new script called enterbuild has been added to drop into a running build just before a port is built for purposes of in-depth troubleshooting. See the README for more details.
• A bell character ('\007') is printed at the end of a tinderbuild to alert the user the build has completed.
• Various bugs have been fixed.

Latest Tinderbox sources can be checked out from anonymous CVS at marcuscom.com. Get instructions for anonymous access or browse CVSweb. Tinderbox lives in portstools module.

Upgrade Instructions

Consult the README for instructions for upgrading to the latest version of Tinderbox.

NOTE FOR USERS UPGRADING FROM TINDERBOX 2.0: The user password encryption algorithm has changed. You must regenerate all user passwords after upgrading to 2.1.0 or later.

Tinderbox Users

Public installations

i386 GNOME 2 Packages

amd64 GNOME 2 Packages

Personal installations

Pav Lucistnik, Florent Thoumie, Tom McLaughlin, Jeremy Messenger, Mario Sergio Fujikawa Ferreira, Michael Johnson, Kirill Ponomarew, Michael L. Hostbaek, Oliver Lehmann, Erwin Lansing

Acknowledgments

Tinderbox would not be where it is today without the invaluable contributions of Michael L. Hostbaek, Oliver Lehmann, Ade Lovett, Pav Lucistnik, and Jeremy Messenger.

$MCom: tinderweb/index.html,v 1.48 2007/12/19 02:12:47 marcus Exp $