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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-27T06:35:44+00:00

It seems that a build system best-practice is to have a single script that

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It seems that a build system best-practice is to have a single script that can build all source and package the releases. See Joel Test #2

How do you account for non-portable dependencies? For example, if you code for .net 4, then you need .net 4 installed on the box. Standard MS release .net 4 is not xcopy deployable (unless I’m mistaken?). I can see a few avenues:

  1. the dependencies are clearly stated in some resource file (wiki, txt, whatever). When you
    call the build script, the build will fail if you don’t have the dependency installed. This is an acceptable outcome.
  2. The build script is responsible for setting up the environment. So if you require .net 4 and its not on the box then it installs it for you.
  3. A flavor of #2 – instead of installing dependencies, the script spawns a pre-packaged image (virtual machine, Amazon EC2 AMI) that is setup with all dependencies
  4. ???
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  1. Editorial Team

    For implementing a build script you have to ask yourself, how much work you want/can spent on it. This leads to the question how often you have to set up the build environment. I can see #2 would be the perfect solution, but i would need a lot of work, since usually you have more than one non portable dependency.

    So we use #1 one. And it works quite well. The most important thing is, that the build script is starting with some sort of self-test. It looks for everything which is needed to build the whole software and gives an error if something is not found. And it gives a clear error message, so that any new guy knows what to do to make it running. Of course as with a lot of software it is nearly never finished and gets extended by needs. The drawback that this test can take some seconds is insignificant when whole build process needs more than minutes.

    A wiki (or even sth. else) with the setup solution was not a good solution for us, since after three month nobody knows where this was, but the build script is used every day.

    The build script itself is a set of a lot of different things, which where chosen by needs. It is starting with a batch (we are using Windows) which invokes a lot of other things. Other batches, MSBuild, home grown tools. Each step by it self is checking for its own dependencies, to have the problem local and you can see three lines later why this special thing is needed.

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