Re: [Wtp-wst-dev] PsychoPath 1.1 Athena builds

[Mukul Gandhi <mukul.gandhi@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Dave,
   Sorry for delay in reply. I was reading Martin's article, and took some
time to read it. It's a nice article.

I am not a build expert. But I feel, a true continuous integration is
beneficial for smaller code base, which is sufficiently stable, and the
team size is also small.
For PsychoPath, I think instead of triggering a build with every commit
(which to me, looks like a build overhead), a build can be triggered every
hour (which will primarily be useful for developers, with the condition
that, build would occur only if any part of code has changed). A nightly
build will also be beneficial, for the users (a build will be triggered,
only if any part of code has changed since the last successful build).

Regards,
Mukul

Mukul Gandhi wrote:
> It's still a nightly build, so it
> is scheduled to run once a day at 21:00. So it's not a true continuous
> integration build.
> [mukul] if a nightly build is happening every day at 21:00, I think that
> means at 21:00 every day, the build would take latest code from HEAD, and
> make the JARs, and copy them on the URL you shared earlier.
> Is this correct?
>
That is correct. I'm actually doing some tweaks so that it will only
build if there have been changes to the main psychopath code. Cuts down
the the build churn this way, since we are sharing the build server with
others.

> What do you mean by "true continuous integration build"? Do you mean,
> whenever any thing is committed to CVS HEAD, a build will happen? If this
> is correct, than is it not too much frequent? A nightly build looks to
me,
> the best fastest frequency, which should be given to users.
> Are you aware of projects in community, which build code on the fly (i.e,
> as some code is committed), and give builds to users?
>
Well, building more often, and sooner, allows you to catch Integration
issues, and Test failures much sooner. Which also allows you to find the
failure point quicker.

See, Martin Fowler's continuous integration article on why this is a
good thing: http://martinfowler.com/articles/continuousIntegration.html

There are some projects that do this now at eclipse, but many do
integration builds every 6 hrs, or so due to the length of the build
runs (4 - 5 hrs).
> I'll be working on a way to get these builds occurring more often when
> changes happen. Still learning about some of the options with Athena.
> [mukul] Is a more frequent build (i.e, whenever something is committed to
> HEAD) helpful, than the nightly build?
> I though nightly builds would be sufficient for the users (please see my
> point above).
>
The nightly builds will be good for the users, the more frequent builds
are good for the Developers as we can be notified of build failures. See
Continuous Integration article above for more info.

Dave