[ale] Build servers?

[Charles Shapiro]

Hmm.  Much of my day job consists of managing a build server.

The classical solution for this kind of problemo is ant (
http://ant.apache.org/ ) plus some kind of manager script like
CruiseControl, Maven, anthill, or a simple shell script kicked off by a cron
job ( as you currently have it).  Apache ant is kind of a super-duper
make(1) language, which you can use to code a large variety of build and
test tasks.  You'll heed a recent java implementation on your build machine
to use it, but you can make stuff in about any language. We're currently
using it to compile a big complex hideous C++ application, then package it
in a variety of different ways.  We nuke 'n' pave about a million lines of
source and then check it out from subversion on every build.

This might be a little heavy-weight for what you're currently thinking
about,  but the advantage of gritting your teeth, learning the tool, and
setting it up is that you'll have a much simpler framework as your Troubles
grow and you have to take care of error notifications, more architectures,
different packages (rpm anyone?), et cetera and so forth.  A 500-line shell
script to handle all of this gets unwieldy fast, and it's dificult to hand
it off to someone else.

Also also I've found that if either you hate java or your java-fu is low,
jython works just fine with ant for the inevitable day when you have to do
some weird custom thing not covered by the language itself.

- CHS


On 10/23/07, Michael B. Trausch <mike at trausch.us> wrote:
>
> Hey everyone,
>
> Does anyone know where I can find information on setting up my own
> automatic build server?  A friend of mine and myself are trying to
> manage a (growing) number of packages, and it would be really nice if we
> could just send them off to our own build server that would build these
> packages for a target distribution, both x86 and x86-64 architectures.
>
> Basically, what I'd like to do is to have my server (which is presently
> vastly under-utilized) set up so that we can "dput" the source package
> at it, and we can just prep the source package and some time later it
> will spit out .debs for us.  The way that I understand it, the piece of
> software that does this is buildd, but I don't want buildd to be
> rebuilding all of Debian or Ubuntu or whatever it is that we're
> packaging for.  I just want it to manage the builds for the packages
> that we're working on, and pull dependencies from the base system as
> needed.
>
> Perhaps my google-fu stinks, but I can't find anything that gives me
> enough information to determine if buildd is even what I am looking for,
> or if there is something else that I am really in need of.  Anyone tried
> this before?
>
>         --- Mike
>
> --
> Michael B. Trausch                                   mike at trausch.us
> home: 404-592-5746, 1                                 www.trausch.us
> cell: 678-522-7934                       im: mike at trausch.us, jabber
> pidgin/tb2 for ubuntu feisty: www.trausch.us/pidgin
>
>
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