Platform-releng/Platform Build Automated

Purpose

This page is a small addition to Platform-releng/Platform_Build. Be sure you have read that first and are familiar with the concepts (and preferably have done "local builds" as described there).

The CBI-based automated builds for, Platform Releng, essentially automates the steps described in Platform-releng/Platform_Build and does a few additional things meant to be convenient for Platform committers, who are used to the procedures in the PDE based builds. This page gives the briefest overview, and describes what's different. [Note: the scripts/code used to do these things might well someday make their way to some "common tools" repository, but most are "platform specific" and not meant as "API" or to be re-used as-is ... but, naturally, if others find them useful as a starting point are free to make a copy, etc., under EPL constraints.]

Contributing to a build

Primary Method

Typically, all a committer has to do is commit and push to the branch that code belongs too, and the automated build will fetch the most recent version of that branch, build it, and tag it. [tagging is currently enabled, but not yet "turned on", as of 2/11/2013].

But which branch? The branches that the automated build pulls from, for each repository, are listed in repositories.txt, as before with PDE based builds. But, that is now in a different location. It is in the aggregator repository eclipse.platform.releng.aggregator.git (browse, stats, fork on OrionHub) , in a directory named "streams". For the master (currently Kepler) version, see

http://git.eclipse.org/c/platform/eclipse.platform.releng.aggregator.git/tree/streams/repositories.txt 

Secondary ("Freeze") Method

There are times, such as when nearing a milestone or a release, the project's committers may decide to "freeze" a contribution at a certain point, while they continue to make changes in the branch. At those times, the branch name should be replaced with a specific tag for that repository. You can not, as before "comment out" the repository line. In the PDE case, we essentially still used the maps files, so if repository commented out, we'd still use what was in the map files. In the current system, we still need to know the version to build, since we still need to clone/reset the repository to make sure it is "clean". [Review: Is this paragraph accurate? If so, seems we could enhance in future, and simply use last commit of the submodule to the aggregator itself, assuming the correct version had been built or committed there.]

Nightlies (master) versus Integration Builds

It is not implemented yet, but eventually, you will have the ability to name an 'integration' branch in repositories.txt, and that will be used for I-builds, but N-builds will always force a pull/reset to 'master' to have an early look at code/fixes. [Initially, nightlies will be "just like" integration builds, except not signed and qualifiers based on current date, not date of last change.]

Other tasks of the automated build

The automated build also creates summary pages of the build, and starts jobs on Hudson to do the Unit testing and then creates summaries of test results, as before. Much of this is controlled by scripts and cron jobs that are in a special directory called "production", and some in resources in "eclipse.platform.releng.tychoeclipsebuilder" which conceptually corresponds to the previously used "eclipse.platform.releng.eclipsebuilder". [Some scripts used on the build machine itself are still in a directory named "sdk" in "eclipse.platform.releng.eclipsebuilder" but those will be "copied up" to the "production" directory once all is a little more stable and confirmed working].