[distcc] Re: Finding peers: zeroconf/rendezvous?

[Bret Mogilefsky]

On Wed, 26 Feb 2003 13:25:51 +1100, Martin Pool wrote:
> On 25 Feb 2003, Bret Mogilefsky <mogul at gelatinous.com> wrote:
>> However, I think it's still a pain in the butt to manage making all
>> willing clients aware of each other, particularly in a large
>> organization.
> 
> How many machines do you have?  Is this a real problem or a hypothetical
> one?

You caught me out, it's a hypothetical one.  =)  Here's my motivation: I
manage PlayStation2 developer support.  The compiler for the PS2 is gcc,
and various game developers have complained about it being slow.  I'd like
to include distcc with gcc to make this less of a problem.  If distcc
requires extra setup/cooperation/coordination, they're not likely to go
out of their way to figure out how to set it up; game development's
complex enough as it is.  If I can instead just say "start the distcc
daemon to automatically join a local pool of machines on your subnet and
take advantage of distributed compilation," they'll jump at it.  I figure
that's the way most people using distcc would want it to work in any case,
and it's the reason I haven't pushed it hard for our internal development
yet.

> It ought to be possible to prototype it using rendezvous utilities to
> advertise services and then build DISTCC_HOSTS.  I'd be interested to
> hear if that works well.  Presumably there are command-line clients to
> do this; if not there should be.

Yes, Apple's distribution includes command-line mDNS examples, and that's
probably the first thing to try.  The real benefit, though, would be to
put this in distcc itself... Then it could use DISTCC_HOSTS as explicit
additions to any hosts it finds by itself via zeroconf.

> I'm a bit skeptical about random machines volunteering because
> 
>  - they might not be secure
> 
>  - they might have the wrong compiler version
> 
> But aside from that Rendezvous sounds like a good way to go.

Couldn't address these, but we can burn that bridge when we come to it. =)

I haven't time to explore implementing this now, but I may in a month or
so. If anyone else looks at it, let me know so I don't duplicate your
work...

And thanks for the speedy reply!

Bret