RFC: speed up gerrit verifications by using dependency artifacts

[André Boddenberg]

Hi,

some weeks a go the topic about using dependency-artifacts to speed up
gerrit verifications was mentioned by Neels in the "RFC: jenkins
pipeline" thread [1].

I was curious and wrote a bash script (osmo-artifacts.sh) [2], which
enables build jobs to archive and fetch dependencies. Instead of
Docker it simply uses archives to store them. An artifact's name has
the following form:

    ( n(${project}.${branch}.${shortRev}_) ).tar.gz

Openbsc builds are 50 % faster when using artifacts. [3]

The jenkins.sh [2] script had to be slightly modified i.e. basically
split into two functions:

  1) buildProjectDeps()
  2) buildProject()

A third function to generate the artifact name has been added. The
template.sh [2] script illustrates this description.


What do you think about the result/artifactStore/approach in general?

A cleanUpArtifactStore.sh script running as a cron job is already on
my mind, but imo it's a good point to discuss the intermediate result.


blobb

[1] http://lists.osmocom.org/pipermail/openbsc/2017-March/010400.html
[2] git clone https://github.com/blobbsen/diy-artifacts.git
[3] https://jenkins.blobb.me/job/openBSC_multi-configuration_withArtifacts_testRefactoring/buildTimeTrend