Re: Production builds of software projects...

[Paul Sander]

A different method that I've been using successfully for years is a
mechanism called "buildrefs".  It's a primitive publish/subscribe
tool that allows a build to advertise various resources in the form
of paths, and another build to query for such resources.

Some of my projects use this to compute a -classpath parameter for
the Java compiler.  I also use it to compute various other environment
variable and makefile variable settings.

For this to work, the thirdparty products are typically stashed in
their own baseline builds.  The advertised resources are sources or
products stored in the baselines, and the list of published resources
is also under source control.

References to the baselines are usually computed in a repeatable way,
then checked in (along with other build state information) for
reproducibility.

If you're interested in learning more about this, you can find the
definitive sources for these tools at http://www.wakawaka.com/source.html

--- Forwarded mail from address@hidden

Wondering if other development teams restrict access to 3rd party jars as
part of their production builds. We are limiting the source of 3rd party
jars in the sense that developers can't just add a new dependency. They must
submit a request to use an existing jar, or a request to add a new 3rd party
jar to version control. The point of this is to ensure cross development
teams use a common set of versioned jars.

My question is related to CVS checkout and/or export. As part of our build
system we maintain a list of 3rd party jars per product and/or component. We
pass into the ANT build script the list. Problems...
1) We can't pull the list as one pull from CVS... Any ideas?

2) We can not pull from one project into a specific directory. Always need
to copy the jars from their project structure into the project under
construction. I'd like to be able to pull files from one project into a
different directory. Any ideas?

I'm using the CVS command from ANT. Are others doing the same? How do you
control dependencies? Do you allow developers to checkin the dependencies?
We wanted to control this because we would have the same jar in many
locations.

--- End of forwarded message from address@hidden