New release of Test-AutoBuild 1.2.1

I finally got around to doing some more work on Test-AutoBuild – a build and test automation framework for upstream developers. It checks sources out of SCM repos (CVS, Subversion, SVK, GNU Arch, Mercurial, Perforce), runs any build and test processes. It detects any RPMs generated during the build and publishes them in a YUM repo. It also publishes HTML status pages showing build logs, list of generated packages, any artifacts generated (eg, code test coverage reports, API documentation) and changelogs from the SCM repo. It is a similar system to CruiseControl, but is more powerful since it directly understands the idea of module dependancies, and so can intelligently manage chained builds of multiple dependant modules. We use this in the ET group for testing our virtualization stack. Our nightly builder builds libvirt and gtk-vnc first, then builds virt-viewer and virt-install against these builds, and finally builds virt-manager against all of them. So any change in libvirt gets validated to make sure it doesn’t break apps using libvirt. Since autobuild understands the dependancies, it can do intelligent build caching. eg if there were new changes in the libvirt SCM repo, but none in the virt-manager repos, it will still do a rebuild of virt-manager as a regression test

This new release version 1.2.1 was all about making the SCM checkout process more reliable. Previously if a module could not be checked out (eg due to a server being down, or a config file typo) the entire build cycle would be aborted. With the new release, the troublesome module is simply skipped and the SCM logs published for the admin to diagnose – other modules in the build cycle continue to be built