Xenofarm project under way

While AutoBuild has served well and helped maintain and improve backwards compatibility and platform independence, as well as give prompt notice about additions that break the most recent CVS version of Pike from building and/or running the testsuite without encountering errors, the system has also had its share of flaws and annoying shortcomings, not to mention the pain of manually keeping the system running. The never ending maintenance and human labour that was needed to keep the system breathing with the rather overevolved and iteratively kludged code base motivated a rewrite, and now we are finally under way.

In preparation of the forthcoming Pike move, we started from scratch on a worthy successor for the system, revisiting some design thoughts and redoing right all of those things that we learned from AutoBuild that were not, while at the same time extending the scope from just building Pike to making a system that could be deployed for building just about anything, or indeed carrying some other kind of work payload alltogether, distributed over any number of machines across the internet.

You will probably see Xenofarm put to use in lots of interesting different contexts in the future, apart from building and testing Pike. Your imagination sets the limit. Xenofarm aims for being the really comfortable and easy-to-deploy system for distributing work across the net for the entire world of free software development. Stay tuned for what the future holds for us.