Question

I everyone, I am using Eclipse, Subclipse, and ANT. I would like to generate a build manifest with the files that have changed, added, updated, deleted, from the repo (with the individual version numbers on my current system).

    <propertyfile file="${dist.dir}\deploymentManifest.txt"
        comment="This file is automatically generated - DO NOT EDIT">        
        <entry key="buildtime" value="${builtat}"/>
        <entry key="build" value="${svnversion}"/>
        <entry key="version" value="${version}"/>
        <entry key="systemLocation" value="${directory/filename.ext}"/>
    </propertyfile>

How do I peel that information from the files in Eclipse? or how do I use ANY to retrieve this info?

Thanks,
Frank

Answer 1

Well, ${buildtat} could be taken from the <tstamp> task in Ant. The others could be parsed by doing a svn log --xml and then using the resulting XML from a <xmlproperties> task. Right off the top of my head (i.e. no error checking):

<!-- Gets the Time Stamp -->
<tstamp>
  <format property="buildtat" pattern="MM/dd/yyyy HH:MM"/>
</tstamp>

<!-- Generates the revision information you need-->
<exec
   executable="svn"
   output="${svn.log.file}">
   <arg line="log --xml -rHEAD/>
</exec>

<!-- Reads that information into a Property -->

<xmlproperty file="${svn.log.file}"/>

<echo message="Subversion Rev: ${log.logentry{revision}}"/>

However, I’d recommend you look at a continuous build system like Jenkins. Whenever you make a change in your Subversion repository, Jenkins picks up the change and automatically does a new build. Not only does this allow you to verify that your changes don’t break your build, but Jenkins can do other things too like run JUnit tests. Jenkins then stores your build and the results of your tests and the whole build log in an easy to get to HTML page.

Where Jenkins will work for you is that Jenkins automatically exposes such things as the Subversion Revision as part of the build process. You can fetch the Subversion Revision, the Jenkins build number, the name of the Jenkins project and many other things as environment variables. Then, you could do this:

<property env="env."/>

<propertyfile file="${dist.dir}\deploymentManifest.txt"
    comment="This file is automatically generated - DO NOT EDIT">        
    <entry key="buildtime" value="${env.BUILD_ID}"/>
    <entry key="build" value="${env.SVN_REVISION}"/>
    <entry key="version" value="${BUILD_NUMBER}"/>
    <entry key="systemLocation" value="${directory/filename.ext}"/>
</propertyfile>

Take a look at Jenkins. It’s fairly easy to understand and use.

It should take you about 5 minutes to download and maybe 10 minutes on a Linux system to get up and running. Windows is more complex and might take as long as 15 to 20 minutes to get up and running. You can run it on your desktop system for now, and play around with it.

It should take you maybe another half hour to figure out how to setup a project that can automatically do builds whenever someone does a commit.

Jenkins is web based, but comes with its own light weight web based application engine. All you need is Java 1.6 to run it. (And, if you’re using Eclipse, you should already have that).