Don't keep builds if nothing has changed

[Nicola Heald]

If we're running daily builds and today's build is exactly the same as yesterdays, we should discard the build as nothing has changed and the build wasn't needed.

[David Murphy (schwuk)]

How would we do the comparison?

How would we inform the user that the build was unnecessary?

How do we point people at the latest build? Perhaps a "current" symlink like cdimage?

[Kevin McDermott (bigkevmcd)]

We could start by md5ing builds to see if they change...

[Kevin McDermott (bigkevmcd)]

Also, we could delete older matching builds, so we only keep the latest with the same md5...

[Nicola Heald (notnownikki)]

> How would we do the comparison?

Checksums are generated automatically, we check them against the previous build's checksums.

> How would we inform the user that the build was unnecessary?

Send an email saying "The daily build for Project X was not kept as it was identical to the previous build (http://link-to-previous-build)." We could put a limit on these emails, perhaps only send them out three times, or just once saying "Builds will be kept again once the built image changes"

> How do we point people at the latest build? Perhaps a "current" symlink like cdimage?

Sounds good. There's a current symlink there already which points at the current build, but I'm not sure if that gets synced to oem share or not. Probably not as it can point at a failed build. A "latest" symlink sounds good though.

[Cody A.W. Somerville (cody-somerville)]

The md5sums will never be the same. The build stamp included in the root filesystem includes the build name among other information which is unique per build.

[David Murphy (schwuk)]

It doesn't appear that this is a viable option.