[ANN] New universal seed ("uniseed") is ready to be used for build

[Paul Sokolovsky]

Hello,

An updated seed for Android platform is available as
http://android-build.linaro.org/seed/uniseed.tar.gz . The requirement
when preparing this seed was to make one which includes all
repositories used by our manifest. Unfortunately, with such approach we
just had swing of pendulum from one extreme to another. The old seed
tarball was based only on (now pretty dated) pandaboard manifest, so
other boards had to fetch increasingly more source with it. The new
seed became not only comprehensive, but also very big and thus sluggish
to download: its size 14Gb which is 4+ times increase over the previous
one.

So, it's clear that we'll need other iteration(s) to find good
compromise, but in the meantime the new seed fixes issues we had with
older one: increasing rate git fetch failures and overall fetch times.
With new seed, totals source preparation time is ~10mins. With the old
one, we had ~9mins in the best cases. For the worst, I specifically
did some statistic analysis and plotted graphs:

https://wiki.linaro.org/Platform/Android/SeededBuilds#Benchmarks_and_Statistics

As they show, there were builds were source preparation took almost
half an hour. They also show that besides background slowly increasing
checkout times, it big time increases happen in jumps (apparently when
big repository, like kernel, being added/changed).

To use the new seed, REPO_SEED_URL should be set to the URL provided:

REPO_SEED_URL=http://android-build.linaro.org/seed/uniseed.tar.gz

I made a number of builds using new seed (~pfalcon/*-uniseed) which
didn't show any issues (I don't expect any "what actually gets built"
concerns - we've done with those during initial seed builds leveraging).


So, I would like to propose switching to the new seed once release is
done, for example, this Saturday, to have results by Monday. Please let
me know if this sounds ok.



Thanks,
Paul

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