[Gllug] [OT] Maven alikes

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Wed, Jul 20, 2005 at 12:26:00PM +0100, Mamading Ceesay wrote:
> On 20/07/05, Daniel P. Berrange <dan at berrange.com> wrote:
> > 
> > Regardless of what you use for documentation, build, and quality metries
> > the automation of your processses is the key. 
> >
> 
> I totally agree with Daniel on this, I would go further and also
> automate the enforcement of policies, hence the use of Subversion
> post-commit hooks.

Personally I'm not a fan of hooking builds into VCM commit hooks
for a couple of reasons.

 * With non-trivial projects it can lead to very long delays between
   a developer comitting and it being available for other developres
   to checkout & work with. One project I've recently worked on had
   a build cycle time of 8 hours. 

 * I like to think co-developers have at least some level of clue
   that they can be reasonably trusted to commit correct code. Sure
   mistakes occassionally happen which cause breakage, but one would
   hope these are pretty rare. An asynchronous build process not
   directly tied to checkins will catch these rare mistakes almost
   as quickly as a synchornous one tied to commits, without penalizing
   developers in the common case

 * A commit hook which checks module A still compiles, does nothing
   to ensure that modules B, C & D which depend on A, are still
   working. So you need an asynchronous builder anyway to perform
   full regression builds against the whole set of modules, not
   just those you personally are committing on.

BTW, if you do have developers who frequently commit broken code,
a carrot & stick approach will usually ammend their ways. eg, configure
autobuild to email spam directly them whenever the build breaks - if
it breaks early in a build cycle, they will be getting one mail every
5-10 minutes, which is some encouragement to be more careful nexttime.
A stronger strick, is to have the email spam go to the entire
developer team, which pisses every one off, so they'll all go
hassle the lazy guy into being more careful. It does actually work -
i've been on the receiving end of such spam before & i've ammended my
ways now :-)

Regards,
Dan.
-- 
|=-            GPG key: http://www.berrange.com/~dan/gpgkey.txt       -=|
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|=-   berrange at redhat.com  -  Daniel Berrange  -  dan at berrange.com    -=|
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