Hydra's web interface got a face lift today:
http://hydra.nixos.org/project/gnu
It's more pleasant to the eye, and clearer.
See http://www.gnu.org/software/devel.html#Hydra for more info on continuous builds for the GNU Project.
Tired of mainstream free software distros and operating systems? Then this is for you:
http://hydra.nixos.org/job/gnu/hurd-master/qemu_image/latest/download
It's a fresh QEMU image of GNU (aka. GNU/Hurd), the extensible operating system designed to liberate users from the tyranny of sysadmins, professional kernel hackers, and other restrictions to Freedom #1.
The image is continuously cross-built from GNU/Linux, using the Nix package manager, off the VCS of GNU Mach, the Hurd, Coreutils, grep, and Guile 2.0.x. It also contains snapshots of other programs, such as Zile, GCC, and GNU Make.
The intent is (1) to allow integration testing of Mach, the Hurd, and the C library, and (2) to allow other GNU packages to be tested on GNU/Hurd in a virtual machine.
The slides of a talk I gave at Inria about continuous integration and specifically Hydra, modestly entitled "Hydra: Top-notch continuous integration for demanding people", are available at:
http://sed.bordeaux.inria.fr/seminars/hydra-ci_20111103.pdf
It presents the rationale behind continuous integration, shows the main features of Hydra, and gives an overview of how to write Hydra "build recipes" in the Nix language.
Many GNU projects have been continuously built by the Hydra instance at TU Delft, providing quick feedback to GNU hackers. They can be seen at:
http://hydra.nixos.org/project/gnu/
More information about Hydra & GNU is available at:
http://www.gnu.org/software/devel.html#Hydra
The "build recipes" for these projects, which specify build jobs, their dependencies, and associated actions, have been moved from svn.nixos.org to a Git repository at Savannah:
https://savannah.gnu.org/projects/hydra-recipes/
The Hydra manual has been improved and now describes the main ideas behind those recipes:
http://hydra.nixos.org/job/hydra/trunk/tarball/latest/download-by-type/doc/manual
Please request membership to the ‘hydra-recipes’ project to get access to the repository and start fiddling with your project's recipes!