I’ve got a continuous integration setup using Hudson and lately I’ve configured the jobs to use svn update to get the latest version of the code. I really like this approach since it allows msbuild to version appropriately and only build the effected assemblies.
However, I’ve noticed that since I’m not doing a build of all the assemblies again, I loose all of the compiler warnings for those assemblies if they aren’t built.
For example, if I have 3 assemblies with dependencies demonstrated via indenting:
- Assembly 1 10 warnings
- Assembly 2 (Depends on 1) 10 warnings
- Assembly 3 (Depends on 2) 10 warnings
- Assembly 2 (Depends on 1) 10 warnings
The first build will build all 3 assemblies and log 30 warnings.
Next build, if I only change Assembly 3, Hudson will only build Assembly 3 and I will only get 10 warnings for that build, effectively marking 20 warnings as “fixed”.
As far as I can tell, there isn’t going to be any way around this, but I would love to know if anyone has configured Hudson to retain these compiler warnings from one build to another.
Edit: Yes I realize that this can turn into a debate of “you should / shouldn’t be doing an update on a CI box”, but there are reasons we went with the update approach.
- Its roughly 3x faster
- We’re still producing the most up to date assemblies
- msbuild can version the assemblies appropriately.
I would change your approach to a CI build. Doing an incremental build on a build machine is very misleading, and only of marginal value (IMHO) and unless your system is the size of an operating system you are probably not saving yourself much time.
If you have assemblies which do not change often or ever, package them away as “third party” dependencies (maybe even in a merge module so your deployment can pick them up easily) and don’t rebuild them with your CI.
On the other hand, if all your assemblies are volatile (need to be rebuilt more than once in a release cycle) build them all, all the time.