new scripts to drive nightly builds available, please try

[Alexander Neundorf]

On Monday 03 May 2010, Alexander Neundorf wrote:
> On Monday 03 May 2010, Andreas Pakulat wrote:
> > On 03.05.10 21:46:36, Alexander Neundorf wrote:
> > > On Monday 03 May 2010, Volker Krause wrote:
> > > > On Sunday 02 May 2010 14:26:56 Alexander Neundorf wrote:
> > > > > On Sunday 02 May 2010, Volker Krause wrote:
> > > > > > [1] It would be nice if it would be possible to pass additional
> > > > > > arguments to ctest when using e.g. make Experimental in some way.
> > > > > > In our case we
> > > > >
> > > > > In which case do you need "make Experimental" ?
> > > > > This just builds what you currently have on your disk.
> > > >
> > > > I used make Experimental just as an example, I guess we eventually
> > > > want Continuous instead in this case. But since the goal is
> > > > minimal-intrusive integration into an existing system, it'll need
> > > > some adjustments (such as printing the full logs and not doing svn up
> > > > for example).
> > >
> > > Why shouldn't it do svn up ?
> >
> > Because the system doing the build might not be using svn, but for
> > example a git-svn or mercurial-svn or some other distributed-vcs-svn
> > bridge. I at least have that for all kde projects I work on regularly.
>
> Shouldn't it in this case do an update/pull from git or hg ?

Question is also, what is the purpose to get Nightly or Continuous builds on a 
_central_ cdash site.
IMO the purpose is definitely to check the state of the central/main/master 
repository of each package.
Currently for KDE/ this is still svn. So the Nightlys or Continuous builds 
have to get their sources from svn.
I don't think it helps a lot to see on this cdash that some git clone from 
somebody is broken at some time.

These builds don't check what a developer has on disk, they check the state of 
the central repository.

If a software is developed mainly in one time zone, the purpose of a Nightly 
build is clear: make sure that after the work of the day has been done, 
everything is working fine.
In KDE we don't really have that, contributors are distributed all over the 
world, so here a Nightly just checks the state of the main repository at 
_some_ point in time.

Maybe for distributed projects like KDE Continuous builds are more important 
than Nightlies, but they also require more CPU time (24h/7d basically), while 
Nightlys just require 2h/7d or so.

Alex