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Build Workshop 1/Report

< Build Workshop 1
Revision as of 18:49, 13 September 2006 by Bjorn.eclipse.org (Talk | contribs) (Action Items)

Draft
Report to the Planning Council from the Europa Build Workshop

Summary

We (Nick Boldt, Natalie Burdick, John Casey, Ward Cunningham, Max Feldman, Dennis O'Flynn, Bjorn Freeman-Benson, Thomas Halgren, Bill Kayser, Ben Konrath, Sue Lee, Hubert Leung, Scott Lewis, Henrik Lindberg, Pete Mackie, Kim Moir, Andrew Overholt, Denis Roy, Ted Williams, David Wolfe) met at McMenamin's Edgefield, September 12-13, 2006 to discuss build systems and release engineering around Europa (and Eclipse in general).

Our dicussions gathered around the following four focii. We respectfully submit this report to the Planning Council for their consideration in Europa planning. Some of us have taken action items (recorded below) to improve the build and release process for Eclipse projects in general.

For future communication, the cross-projects mailing list is at https://dev.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/cross-project-issues-dev

Eclipse Build Best Practices

We have identified a number of release engineering best practices across eclipse.org projects. This topic is about promoting these practices and providing tools to encourage standardized adoption of these practices. This is a good idea because we are replicating tools across projects and this wastes valuable committer time. We want to encourage these practices because the most successful projects employ a high level of automation to reduce the amount of human induced error.


  1. Tooling to support versioning consistent with the eclipse standard Version_Numbering.
  2. Track API changes - To see what has been added, changed or removed. Identify usage of internal APIs.
    1. TPTP uses jdiff to generate reports API change reports.
    2. TPTP has a bash script to generate a report on internal API usage.
    3. WTP also has a tool
  3. Tag files from each release with the same human-readable tag
    1. Use eclipse releng tool to tag release from map files.
  4. Making builds reproducible
  5. Pack 200 Pack200. Pack200 can provide a better update experience and reduced bandwidth utilization at eclipse.org and mirrors.
  6. Hubert wrote a tool that generates a web page that displays feature structure and depandancies. report
    1. He also has an additional tool that conducts dependancy analysis.
  7. A tutorial or example for new projects on how to set up their builds.
  8. documentation up-to-date; current link available on website; remove old contents
  9. backup redundant systems
  10. separate publishing script from “build” (compilation)
  11. able to turn functions on the build on or off e.g. turn off publishing
  12. regularly scheduled builds
    1. Gentle public humilitaion
    2. Send email to public mailing list or wiki/web page
    3. send email to responsible parties
  13. have an update site; optimize update sites
  14. feature design – group plug-ins based on functional grouping, optimize feature design for PDE build.


Go to Europa Build Workshop Home page


Action Items

  • Web site content of each projects' build process should be updated by date X (with respect to the release schedule) and a person should be identified for each project so that should problems be surfaced a human can be contacted, prize TBD.
  • Ask a smaller project to provide their templates for other teams to build upon.
  • Hubert will make the feature dependancy tool open source.
  • (15 September - Andrew, Ben) Finish Making Builds Reproducible page
  • September 25: (Hubert, Dave, Kim) Post an initial list of the best practices from the workshop to the wiki; send an email to all committers and project leads asking them to submit their own best practices to the wiki
  • September 29 - Provide all existing versioning tools for download and evaluation. Promote the best tool for use within the Europa Release.
  • October 2: (Hubert, Dave, Kim) Recommend to the Planning Council that they adopt practices

Recommendation to all teams to use pack200 in their builds. (Send to planning council). X, Y, Z as requirements for Europa and M, N, P as 'should do' for Europa. Etc.

  • October 15: (Hubert, Dave, Kim) Send another email to the same group encouraging more conversation
  • October 15: (Hubert, Dave, Kim) ask EclipseCon 2007 to schedule a session around Build Best Practices.
  • ...etc...

RSS Feeds

The use of RSS feeds solves a number of issues in cross-project communication, and also open a door for cross-project build automation. It can serve as a tool for notification, and also as the input to builds which depend on updates to their upstream dependent projects.

More information on how to set up feeds, XML Schema describing the feed, examples and related bugs can be found here.

Discussion Points:

  • All Europa enabled projects will publish an RSS feed based upon the same XML Schema.
  • All Europa enabled projects are recommended to store RSS feeds in CVS for auditing/backup.
  • All Europa enabled projects must publish on download.eclipse.org in predictable and consistent locations.
    • This will ensure a consistent format for all downstream projects that may be listening for RSS build notifications.
  • All project build RSS notifications will be published to download.eclipse.org to minimize node replication and mirroring delays.
    • This will allow RSS listeners to wait for their most convenient mirror.
  • Project builds will publish an RSS feed entry for any build that may be of interest.
    • Feeds should include all types of builds (i.e. nightly, integration, maintenance, stable, release).
    • Feed updates should be published the same way projects currently publish builds; eg., if N builds are currently not published to download.eclipse.org, N build feedss are probably not necessary.
    • Feeds can be updated with changed build/test status as needed, so that responding to the notification of a new build need not be held up by long-running tests (eg., Eclipse platform)
  • It is up the RSS listener to determine what type of action should be taken depending upon the content of the RSS notification.

Action Items

Action items with dates and (where possible) individuals.

  • September 25: (Nick) Improve the already good spec on the wiki/web to a highly detailed spec, including restrictive vocabulary for build and test status. Send email (Cross Project Issues Dev mailing list) to the Europa build engineers and project leads of the Europa leads asking them for feedback before October 13.
  • October 20: (Nick) Declare the specification to be "mostly" frozen. Not withstanding continued incremental improvement, this is the RSS spec that all the projects will implement.
  • November 20: (All Europa projects) Have implemented publishing RSS information for their build, and provide a link on their website's homepage to that feed
  • January 26: (All Europa projects) Have implemented listening to RSS information for their build's upstream dependencies, plus some degree of automated response (eg., emails or automated builds).

Buckminster/Maven Build Enablement for BIRT and ECF

Background goes here on Buckminster/Maven and the corresponding Europa Workshop discussions (Build Best Practices and Common Build Infrastructure) that led to this initiative. What this is (Buckminster and Maven as a build technology). How Buckminster and Maven offered to help BIRT restructure their build. How ECF is the "small project" example. Why this is a good idea.

Introduction

The following organizations and individuals will be working on this Europa initiative to deliver complete build project migration for BIRT and ECF by March 3, 2007, based on agreed-upon requirements and milestones from this initiative.

  • Buckminster: Thomas Hallgren, Henrik Lindberg - Buckminster Engineers
  • Maven: John Casey - Maven Engineers
  • BIRT: Sue Lee - Release Engineer
  • ECF: Pete Mackie - Release Engineer
  • Simula Labs: Natalie Burdick - Project Manager/Coordinator for this initiative

Action Items

Initial Milestones based on High Level Activities below to be delivered by September 22, 2006:

  1. Buckminster/Maven Integration Activity:
    • Buckminster User/Dev Mailing List Membership (John to subscribe)
    • Committer Status at Buckminster for John (Team to vote)
  2. BIRT Build Project Conversion
    • Buckminster User Mailing List Membership (Sue/BIRT Team to subscribe)
    • BIRT team to download/perform initial Buckminster evalution (Sue)
    • BIRT team to review Buckminster Wiki (Sue)
    • Plugin/TLP Build Scripts needs to be reviewed (Sue to send to Thomas)
  3. ECF Build Project Conversion
    • CVS Access for Henrik (Pete to provide)
    • ECF Build Conversion (Henrik to review)
    • Buckminster User Mailing List Membership (Pete to subscribe)

Feature Requirements for Buckminster/Maven

  1. Support for maven-artifact(-manager)/maven-project and m2 POMs through revision of Revise MavenComponentType/MavenReader
  2. Support for a MavenActor (see AntActor) to fire off Maven plugins/mojos from Buckminster
  3. Support to map the Maven life cycle to the Buckminster build
  4. Bi-directional synchronization between Maven POMs and Buckminster CSPEC instance

Feature Requirements for BIRT

  1. Support to handle versioning requirements: important to check timestamps in CVS and update versions accorgingly in plugins and features that refer to such plugins (Buckminster can resolve this by adding action that checks (ant-task already present) and modifies)
  2. Support to host required jar files currently stored in p4 from the Maven repo
  3. Javadoc publication support via Maven plugin
  4. Support to test components conditionally, e.g., if db2 is not installed, that test should not be enabled
  5. Support for site.xml creation
  6. Support for existing BIRT project email build notification functionality (build failures and test output sent as emails to developers)
  7. Platform/environment-independent support for the BIRT build

Feature Requirements for ECF

TBD - initial set by Sept 20

Common Build Infrastructure

Introduction

  • A common build infrastructure encompasses a build farm, a tool for build management, and a "dashboard"-esque tool for post-build investigation.
  • We believe that an 80/20 rule can be applied here: we can easily and quickly meet the needs of 80% of the projects out there with a simple, common build setup. Functionality can be built up to satisfy the remaining projects with "special needs" (ie. native code).
  • In an ideal world, all projects would make use of this infrastructure. In the real world, we realize that teams will continue to make use of their existing infrastructure.

Benefits

  • This common infrastructure will augment project facilities and act as a second build environment available for use.
  • This infrastructure can be used by both new projects to ease their startup pain and also by existing projects to standardize build procedures and to take away maintenance costs.
  • Consistency: builds will be reproducible and auditable due to consistent practices
  • Best practices: build best practices are more easy to enforce when build procedures are transparent and consistent
  • Outreach: this can be considered an outreach activity to a certain extent. Increased transparency is not a bad thing :)
  • Committers and projects need not worry about so much setup/infrastructure

Components

  1. Build farm
    1. ie. build.eclipse.org.
    2. Longer term, this may grow to include architectures and operating systems used by projects with native code. This growth will be managed by the needs of projects and provided by the foundation.
  2. Build management tool
    1. EMFT currently has an exemplary tool for customizing and starting builds. Here is a screenshot: EMFTBuildPage2.jpg
  3. "Dashboard"-esque tool
    • common location for interested individuals (team members, external parties, interested projects, community members, etc.) to examine build results
    • provide a source of information for data mining and/or statistical analysis
    • provide a common view for each project so as to enable easy at-a-glance inspection
    • common locations and look and feel for all the builds/downloads are good because they help with community understanding and adoption
    • eg., http://packages.qa.debian.org/f/firefox.html
    • include [CruiseControl]

Action Items for CBI

  • (7 October - Denis) MySQL upgrade
  • (15 October - Nick, Andrew) Assist in migrating ECF to web UI for kicking builds & running tests on their vserver using EMFT as example
  • (1 November - Andrew) Work on proposal for Foundation including what we intend recommendations will entail
  • (1 November - Denis, Henrik, Sue) Set up a vserver for Buckminster/BIRT builds. Denis estimates that if we end up going with vservers, this will cost $750/project (in increments of 6); Denis will ask for money if that route is chosen. Predicted alternative: set this up on build.eclipse.org and don't have vservers.
  • (15 November - Nick, Henrik, Andrew) Explore Buckminster as wrapper for running EMF/EMFT builds
  • (15 November - Nick, Henrik, Andrew) Explore creating a web UI for running Buckminster builds (PHP, XMLRPC?)
  • (1 December - Henrik, Sue, Nick, Denis, Andrew) Report on past few months' work to determine what is required of the foundation for the future
    • (15 December) Based upon report, propose required resources to foundation including the following recommendations:

(Potential) Recommendations

  • staff at eclipse.org to maintain infrastructure (both IT and UI)
  • staff at eclipse.org to manage releng of release train
  • member companies must provide a small (2-4 people total) team of rotating releng people to manage release train
  • build infrastructure hardware at eclipse.org

Communication Channels

For Europa, there needs to be at least one designated contact from each project available via phone, email, IM, etc. For critical periods (milestones and release candidates), the Europa build engineers should be on a common IRC channel or IMs or something.

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