[distcc] Auto discovery of volunteers

[Gerard Beekmans]

Hi guys,

It's been a little while since I last checked up on distcc's status so
this might have been discussed and implemented already. Allow me to ask
it anyway, feel free to redirect me to a FAQ of some sort.

The one missing feature from distcc that prevents me from making optimal
use of it is a way to keep a dynamic list of hosts that are available. I
can't hard-code a list because I don't always have the same machines
available (either turned on, or they're not running distccd at certain
times for one reason or another) so there's a high chance of
distribution failures which slows things down.

Last I checked distcc, it would only read from an environment variable
which hosts to try as volunteer. I just noticed in the latest version it
will also read files. That makes things easier, I could write a program
that queries a list of potential volunteers every minute and checks if
the distcc port is open. If not, remove that host name from the file
distcc uses.

Are there plans to build this into distccd that so it can maintain some
file that the client reads. This won't work if distccd doesn't run on
localhost, but I'm sure there's something else that can be done about
that (something like running distccd locally as a discovery only, not
accepting compile jobs).



-- 
Gerard Beekmans
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org
http://www.beekmansworld.com

// Linux Consultant --- OSDN / DevChannel

// If Linux doesn't have the solution, you have the wrong problem