Continuous Integration

Jobs for one Project

Note

TODO generic naming conventions including -windows suffixes etc.

I think flier has written down something, but CLF’s ci server is down.

Common Jobs

In the following section, NAME refers to the name of the project to which the mentioned jobs belong. An example of such a name would be rsb-cpp, referring to the C++ implementation of RSB.

NAME-trunk

TODO

NAME-trunk-merge-simulator

See also

Branch Names

For recommended names for feature branches.

The task of this job is simulating merges of feature branches into the master and reporting any problems that may occur. The kind of problems that may be detected by this job include:

Merge Conflicts

When the master branch has changed since a feature branch has been created, it may no longer be possible to merge the feature branch back into the master branch without conflicts.

Build Problems

Due to errors in the feature branch or changes in the master branch, the result of merging the feature branch into the master branch may no longer build.

Test Problems

Due to errors in the feature branch or changes in the master branch, after merging the feature branch into the master branch unit errors may occur.

This kind of job should basically perform the following steps

1. Detect changes in branches named feature-NAME-OR-ISSUE-NUMBER or bug-ISSUE-NUMBER (see Branch Names)
2. Merge the feature branch in question into the master branch (automated by the git plugin for Jenkins)
3. Build the resulting source tree (using the same build recipe as the NAME-trunk branch)
4. Run unit tests in the resulting source tree (likewise)

This kind of job should not perform the following steps:

• Record a history of any kind of metrics (since feature branches are transient and builds of different feature branches will be mixed arbitrarily)
• Trigger builds of downstream projects (this reduces load on the CI server and prevents the job from blocked for subsequent builds resulting in quicker turnarounds)
• Build and upload packages
• Send emails
• Participate in the continuous integration game

NAME-trunk-package

TODO

NAME-VERSION

TODO

NAME-VERSION-package

TODO

Example

The figure shows jobs for the trunk and 0.7 versions of a project called rsb-cpp.

In this example, -static-analysis jobs have been added to perform time-consuming operations in a dedicated job.

Furthermore, there are Windows-specific jobs (-windows suffix) which use different build recipes. Ideally, this would not be necessary, but there is currently no realistic perspective of having build recipes which are portable across UNIX and Windows.

Setting up Jobs

TODO