A merged aarch64 tree without a PR build artifact (expired after 7 days,
or a dispatch) was rebuilt on the x86 droplet under QEMU: omarchy-mac-boot
took ~167 of the 240 minutes. A new job builds it on ubuntu-24.04-arm the
way build-pr.yml does and uploads it under the same label, so the publish
job signs and uploads it on the droplet like a PR artifact. The plan logs
reuse or rebuild for every package; x86_64, signing and the publish
concurrency are unchanged.
The droplet pool is x86, so aarch64 builds ran under QEMU about 30x slower;
omarchy-mac-boot's check() took 2h47m of the 180-minute job limit. Heavy
packages stay on the droplets until a native build of each is shown to fit.
Every pull request now builds the package directories it touches on
ephemeral DigitalOcean droplets, and every merge to master publishes the
resulting artifacts into the channels each package belongs to. The
repository host's timers become the fallback rather than the pipeline.
Build (.github/workflows/build-pr.yml)
One job per package per architecture, always against edge. The artifact
is labelled with the package directory's git tree hash. Tooling (bin/,
helpers/, build/) is checked out from the base branch; the PR supplies
only pkgbuilds/, so a PR can change what is built, never how. Builds
run only for trusted authors: collaborators, .github/VOUCHED.td, or a
PR carrying the build-approved label. A single required check, result,
aggregates the matrix.
Publish (.github/workflows/publish.yml, bin/publish-artifact)
One job per merge. It collects the PR artifacts for the merged tree,
builds anything that has none, then walks each channel/architecture
slot once: pull that database, repo-add every package that belongs in
it, upload packages, signatures, then the database. A published
filename is immutable; identical bytes under an existing name only
gain a database entry, different bytes are refused. Fast-ring packages
reach edge, rc and stable in the same run from the same file.
Matrix (bin/build-matrix)
Package x architecture, with the channels the artifact ships to,
decided by package_builds_for_mirror so CI and the host agree.
arch=any packages build once and land in every architecture database.
Builder (build/build.sh, bin/build, build/Dockerfile)
With no local published tree, plan against and resolve from the public
channel over HTTPS. PACKAGER is set to Omarchy. rclone is in the image.
Runners (ci/)
A controller droplet polls GitHub with curl and creates one g5 droplet
per queued job from cloud-init, deleting them when off or over-age.
Builders carry QEMU with credential support for aarch64. Operator SSH
keys come from GitHub. tests/controller.sh and tests/publish-artifact.sh
cover the decisions against fixtures and real makepkg output.
Tests run on pull requests only; branch protection requires result,
self-tests and build-isolation with up-to-date branches.
Marcelo Alcantara