I do run a build bot since 2014 - just to have fun, and to redeem to the Linux distribution Gentoo Linux I do use and trust since 2003. The goal is to identify build and installation issues of Gentoo software packages. For that it acts somehow like a chaos monkey.
The name "tinderbox" for this bot was re-used from the (retired) Gentoo developer flameeyes.
About a dozen Gentoo images are setup from recent stage3 tarball with an arbitrary combination of ~amd64 + profile + USE flag set. In each image all Gentoo packages are attempted to be installed, in each image in another arbitrary order. Once a day @world is updated. No explicit unmerge is made. The ::gentoo repository is synced hourly within each image, changes of it are mixed into its backlog. If emerge starts to have problems (usually after 5-15 days) then an image is replaced. Images with reported bugs are kept around for few weeks.
The ::gentoo coverage of Gentoo packages is about 50% for the past week and about 85% for the past month. The emerge failure rate is usually about 1-3%, sometimes up to 6%. But only few bugs per day are really new and are reported therefore. Few stats and all image files are accessible via http://tinderbox.zwiebeltoralf.de:port. Replace port with 31560 is the captcha you need to solve for that.
The source code is available under the GPLv3.
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