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Date:      Thu, 11 Apr 2002 18:34:09 -0700
From:      Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>
To:        dan@langille.org
Cc:        chat@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: setting up daily builds
Message-ID:  <3CB63991.7B33851F@mindspring.com>
References:  <20020411214456.0E68B3F2D@bast.unixathome.org>

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Dan Langille wrote:
> What do you folks do if you want to build a system/application on a daily
> basis?  How do you view the results?  Any history on those results
> (yesterday's build, last Tuesday's build, etc)?


Normally, I do not set up daily builds for FreeBSD, because of
the way the tree consistency is not guaranteed on CVSup snapshots,
and the lack of enforcement against committers of buildability on
all commits.


For a normal corporate production environment, I generally
maintain two checked out tree instances, and update and
build via cron jobs.  Each checkout is done by (1) tagging the
tree and then (2) checking out via the tag.

With two instances, it's possible to maintain a rolling build
that will automatically roll back changes which break a build
under the tag, and inform the guilty party of the files involved
in the breakage (you do it this way so that your tags can be
light-weight instead of being full on branch tags).

This is generally necessary in production environments, along
with the tagging, so that you can do bug tracking and regression
testing against particular beta builds that are released to
Q/A for testing (without a Q/A department, this is much less
necessary ;^)).

If you can't repeat history, well, then your "fix" will end up
being "can't reproduce", which is totally unacceptable.  You
might as well have all your testing done ad-hoc, with no real
regression testing to prove anything has ever been truly
resolved (I've worked in a place where that was the procedure,
and the resulting product was *not* pretty).

-- Terry

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