Question

I need to build and test on multiple configurations: linux, osx and
solaris. I have slave nodes labeled “linux”, “osx” and “solaris”. On
each configuration, I want to (a) build (b) run smoke tests
(c) if smoke tests pass, then run full tests, and perhaps more.

I thought that multi-configuration jobs might be the answer, so I setup a
multi-configuration build job and it starts concurrent builds on each
OS. The build job will trigger a downstream smoke-test build, which, in
turn, triggers the full-test job.

I’ve run into the following issues

1. If one of the configurations fails, the job as a whole fails, and
   Jenkins will not fire any downstream jobs (e.g., if the solaris build
   fails, Jenkins will not run smoke tests or full tests for osx and
   linux).

2. The solaris build takes about twice as long as the others (on the
   order of an hour), and I’d prefer the linux and osx smoke tests not
   wait for the solaris build to finish.

Does that mean I’m left with hand-crafting three pipelines of jobs, and
putting them behind a “start-all” job (i.e., creating and hand-chaining
the following jobs)?

build-linux   smoke-test-linux   full-test-linux
build-osx     smoke-test-osx     full-test-osx
build-solaris smoke-test-solaris full-test-solaris

Did I miss something obvious?

Answer 1

As far as I know the answer is to create 3 matrix jobs, one for each system. They then would have 3 subjobs (build, smoke-test, fulltest) with the build-job as a touchstone.