I've been thinking what is the best way to create a fully bottom-up build infrastructure for Eclipse-based product. What I mean by "fully" is:
- Developer commits code.
- A new build starts automatically.
- If the build succeeds - run tests.
- If tests are successful - tag the code.
Advantages of this scheme are the following:
- I'll always know what's the status of the product in CVS.
- I can choose the "best" package and promote it without invoking any builds.
Looks simple, isn't it? Now, how would I achieve this with what I have in my hands... In my hands I have:
- CVS repository
- Hudson
- Eclipse
Unfortunately, Hudson can't be used for 100% when building Eclipse plug-ins, since it's rather used as a wrapper to the Eclipse PDE builder. Here, I don't use the ability of Hudson to poll SCM, checkout & tag, present history, etc... OK, I can setup some CVS handler that invokes build in Hudson by accessing URL. So, the first two problems are solved. Hudson executes build script that uses PDE headless builder to build & test my plug-ins. If the build & test where unsuccessful, then I'll see very sad
Mr. Hudson and everything is good so far. But if the build was OK, and number of failed tests is less or equal than in the previous build - then I have to tag the sources. And here I miss the "Team -> Release" action in Ant :-) Even if there was such an action the problem still remains, since plug-ins are versioned with 'HEAD' (and I don't want to use common timestamp version for all plug-ins, but rather for those that have changed from the last tag).
As a conclusion: I see a lot of black magic work and hacks to get this done. Or... am I missing some pretty solution here?
