Build and Unit Tests - Hardware Sponsor?

[Andreas Pakulat]

On 02.06.11 19:34:49, Milian Wolff wrote:
> Andreas Pakulat, 02.06.2011:
> > On 02.06.11 12:55:52, Milian Wolff wrote:
> > > Hey all, greetings from the KDevelop sprint at Randa!
> > > 
> > > If you are interested in what we are up to, see:
> > > 
> > > http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/KDevelop4/Meeting2011
> > > 
> > > Anyhow, back to the actual reason for this email. We want to improve the
> > > quality of our codebase by doing automated build- and unit tests. For
> > > simplicity running it all once per day would suffice already. Required
> > > for that would be hardware, some kind of server. Hence this request:
> > > Anyone has hardware to sponsor to us?
> > > 
> > > Personally I only see these requirements:
> > > * shell access without root rights should suffice
> > > * admin available to install dependencies if required
> > > * ~1GB of memory for us to burn, and some common cpu
> > > note: I want to enforce a ulimit and time limit for unit tests
> > > 
> > > If you want to help KDevelop and have something like this available,
> > > please get in touch with us.
> > > 
> > > Furthermore if someone has any knowledge on setting up a consecutive
> > > build and test runner, share your knowledge (PovAddict?).
> > 
> > Since most devs build KDevelop anyway (and should also run unit-test)
> > you could also check with Alex Neuendorf about the cdash/ctest scripts
> > he has which submits build and test info from a users machine to the
> > public cdash dashboard.
> 
> The issue we/I want to solve is also to make people aware of induced API 
> breakages. We want to reinforce people taking a look after "stable"¹ code, 
> i.e. whenever changing something in kdevplatform make sure kdevelop builds 
> (everyone does that) but people seldomly (if ever?) build php, php-docs, 
> custom-buildsystem, and all those which are about to come.

At least custom-buildsystem and qmake seem to be built quite regularly
(at least master), I've seen 4 or 5 different people report the last
api-changes. But I get your point.

> > As a CI-tools I can recommend hudson, that eliminates the need to write
> > git-monitoring and other stuff oneself. Only downside might be that it
> > may not have the necessary plugin to properly understand the unit-test
> > result files and hence won't be able to provide tha nice over-time
> > report for test failures/success.
> 
> thanks, I'll take a look at that.

I've done a quick google search and there's at least a cmake-builder.
For the unit-tests one would need to check wether/how to get xml out of
the runs and maybe convert that to junit or some other format (I think
there are some plugins for other formats for hudson).

Andreas