Re: Building backwards in time

Hi Jani,
Thanks for the additions. Some comments below.

On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 6:10 PM, Jani Mikkonen <[email protected]>wrote:

> Stepping into thread to just give my ++ to the actual suggestion.
> Feature itself is not that far fetched since other build tools have
> this kind of ability. Buildbot ( http://buildbot.net/trac ) comes to
> mind first (if i remember correctly)
>
> Few pro's for such feature:
> - saved diskspace for not requiring to store the artfifacts for
> extended period of times.


I didn't address the issue of how a historical build will be handled by
policies for automatic compression / deletion. Probably the best solution is
to mark these as manually managed, maybe giving them a different color in
the interface, and let the user either manually delete/archive them from the
interface or just disable manual management. A simpler solution would be
just to apply the policies next time the project is built.


>
> - error verifications, for example: sometimes builds just fail with no
> apparent reason, later on it would require manual work make that
> certain build to happen.


This happens for us on occasion. Mounts can go down on machines for example.
Being able to redo the work would be very useful in these cases! Then
there's issue that continuous integration isn't really useful for:
non-deterministic errors. I suppose there's little CC can do about those.


>
> - say, i've added some new build steps to the builder composite chain:
> Example say, i've just found out a some static analyzer and i want to
> do compare the old versions already being build to the head of a
> trunk.


Also, CC goes down on occasion. The current version seems to be stable but
in some 2.7 versions the CC builder seemed to get stuck in a loop, waiting
forever for builds to complete (way past the time limit specified in the
config.xml file). It would be nice to rebuild the missing history.


>
> - I know this is a poor pro item but i'll mention it anyway: CC
> already has this kind of feature, kinda ;)   One can rebuild the
> latest head anyway, over and over and over again - just be clicking
> the "build" button.
> - just because its a nice feature =)
>
> >From user's perspective, i'd see it implemented something like this:
> Each time scm plugin notices there's changes, get that exact commit id
> stored and store that into the logfiles that cc generates. When user
> is viewing the log of the old build, there's a "rebuild" button
> somewhere and triggering the rebuild would pass the commit id to the
> scm plugin which would checkout the source with that id and rest of
> the build phases are executed as normally..


You also need the ability to specify the rebuild for a version which has no
log. Interface in this case would be more complicated.


>
>
> Obviously something needs to be decided on matter of build index
> incrementing if user has requested a rebuild. And how logfiles's
> possible differences affect each other.
>
>
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