Speeding up CI builds? (Re: ESC meeting minutes: 2020-01-23)

On Thursday 23 of January 2020, Miklos Vajna wrote:
> * Cross compiling LO for Mac on Linux in CI? (Jan-Marek, Thorsten, …)
...
>     + mac is currently not the bottleneck, though (Christian)
>       + rather Linux(gcc+clang) or Windows (and have cloud help for Linux)
>     + no action necessary (Thorsten)
>       + good to keep in mind
>       + may need this at some stage (and then this would help with the
> build part)
> + mac HW is just really expensive (does not scale) 

 So what is the actual need there, if any? Not just Mac, but CI builds in 
general. I think I have enough experience with speeding up builds, so I could 
presumably help if I knew what exactly is needed.

For example, there should be another way to speed Mac builds by 
cross-compiling, namely using icecream to handle that. Icecream has a very 
simple-to-use support for cross-compiling, it'd require only setting up Linux 
build node(s) and Mac would still run the build itself, so there'd be no need 
to alter the build system besides setting CC/CXX. And I happen to be more or 
less the current icecream maintainer.

-- 
 Luboš Luňák
 l.lunak@collabora.com