Question

How does your team handle Builds?
We use Cruise Control, but (due to lack of knowledge) we are facing some problems – Code freeze in SVN – Build management
Specifically, how do you make available a particular release when code is constantly being checked in?

Generally, can you discuss what best practices you use in release management?

Answer 1

I’m positively astonished that this isn’t a duplicate, but I can’t find another one.

Okay, here’s the deal. They are two separate, but related questions.

For build management, the essential point is that you should have an automatic, repeatable build that rebuilds the entire collection of software from scratch, and goes all the way to your deliverable configuration. in other words, you should build effectively a release candidate every time. Many projects don’t really do this, but I’ve seen it burn people (read ‘been burned by it’) too many times.

Continuous integration says that this build process should be repeated every time there is a significant change event to the code (like a check in) if at all possible. I’ve done several projects in which this turned into a build every night because the code was large enough that it took several hours to build, but the ideal is to set up your build process so that some automatic mechanism — like an ant script or make file — only rebuilds the pieces affected by a change.

You handle the issue of providing a specific release by in some fashion preserving the exact configuration of all affected artifacts for each build, so you can apply your repeatable build process to the exact configuration you had. (That’s why it’s called ‘configuration management.’) The usual version control tools, like git or subversion, provide ways to identify and name configurations so they can be recovered; in svn, for example, you might construct a tag for a particular build. You simply need to keep a little bit of metadata around so you know which configuration you used.

You might want to read one of the ‘Pragmatic Version Control’ books, and of course the stuff on CI and Cruise Control on Martin Fowler’s site is essential.