[distcc] Feature request: compile environments

[Frerich Raabe]

Moin,

one feature which icecream[1], a distributed compilation setup developed by
a few KDE folks, provides - and which I would really like to see in
distcc - is the concept of 'environments'.

In an icecream setup, an 'environment' is really only a tarball containing
the few binaries required for turning preprocessed sourcecode into an object
file (for the gory details, you might want to have a look at the create-env
script[2] which generates such environments). For each compile job, an
icecream node then checks whether it needs to ship the environment together
with the preprocessed code or not. This makes icecream very easy to use in
heterogenous networks, and also makes cross-compiling stuff quite simple.

I would be interested in what you people think about this. If there is
sufficient interest, and no immediately obvious technical issues which
make this barely feasible in distcc, I'll have a look at implementing
this.

- Frerich

[1] http://wiki.kde.org/icecream
[2] http://webcvs.kde.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/kdenonbeta/icecream/icecream/client/create-env?rev=1.12&content-type=text/plain