For those who haven’t caught word on the forum already, we implemented a change to how the weekly autobuilds are started today.
Historically, the autobuild script has always run every working build system, every week, filtered only for routers that no longer build successfully. However, development on ROOter sometimes comes in waves, and at times (especially in 2025 and 2026) this has resulted in building a lot of images with no actual functional changes. This has burned not only a lot of compute power, but also a lot of storage space in carp4’s donated archive of older images.
As of today, the script now checks the date of the latest git commit in each system before starting a build. If there is a commit within the past 8 days, it will run. With no new commits, that entire system will be skipped.
Git is a bit of a blunt instrument to solve this – there’s no way to identify changes impacting individual routers and only run those. However, it’s also much better than generating new images with no real changes multiple weeks in a row, so we’ll take what we can get!