The Pd Lab is a place to assist in the development of Pd. It consists of a number of build servers to build Pd every night on a variety of platforms.

A part of the system is hosted by Bauhaus-Universität Weimar (previously it was hosted by IDMI/Polytechnic University).

Compile Farm

The Pd Compile Farm is a collection of machines running operating systems that are popular with Pd users.

Builds are uploaded to http://autobuild.puredata.info/auto-build/

*with Fink **with MinGW/ Cygwin

chroots

The Debian servers all run multiple distros/releases via chroots. You can see what chroots are available on a given machine by running ls /var/chroot. If you want to use one of those chroots, run this to "log in": dchroot -d -c chroot-name. So for example, on debian-stable-amd64, there is a 32-bit i386 chroot:

pddev@debian-squeeze-amd64:~$ ls /var/chroot/
squeeze
pddev@debian-squeeze-amd64:~$ dchroot -d -c squeeze
(squeeze-i386)pddev@debian-squeeze-amd64:~$ 

Autobuild process

The AutoBuildProcess is run on all of these servers. There used to be a central rsync server, but now each server is self-sufficient and just gets the code from SVN and git.

Getting Access

If you are a Pd developer, then you can get ssh access to any of the compile farm machines. The account name is pddev and you need to use your ssh key to log in. In order for your ssh key to work, you will need to request access on pd-dev and include the public key in your email (i.e. ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub). Here's an example of how to log into the debian-stable-amd64 box:

ssh pddev@debian-stable-amd64.pdlab.puredata.info

Join the Compile Farm!

We are looking for machines running Fedora, Arch, Mac OS X 10.7 and 10.8, etc. We could set up more virtual machines with other windows versions (windows 8, for instance) but we are looking for administrators to do the setup and maintaining of those.

If you have control over a computer with a CPU/OS missing from the table above, you can join the Compile Farm and help other people have their fresh Pd and Pd-extended autobuilt and uploaded every day. You will need to make sure of a few things first:

• The computer needs a permanent Internet connection and ssh working. A fixed IP is an advantage.

• You need to be admin on the computer, to be able to set up necessary software and dependencies, and also to make sure the system doesn't get changed suddenly.

• The computer has to be on every day for long enough to complete the autobuild.

To prepare yourself to join the Compile Farm, install all of the dependencies, get the sources, and try to make a build of pd-extended as outlined in AutoBuildProcess. For help on building, and to learn how to set up the daily autobuild cycle, announce yourself on pd-dev.

In order to make accessing of the Compile-Farm machines easier, we assign each host a DNS-entry, e.g. debian-stable-i386.pdlab.puredata.info. If you add or remove machines to the PdLab or change their IP-address or name, please forward this information to our DNS-Administrator.