Updated Test-AutoBuild with new release 1.2.4 and automated builds for virtualization tools

Test-AutoBuild is the oldest open source project of mine that I still actually work on. The original code dates all the way back to approx the year 2000, when Richard Jones and I were working at a now defunct dot-com called BiblioTech (random archive.org historical link). Rich wrote a script called “Rolling Build” which would continuously checkout & build all our software from CVS, publishing the results as RPMs. Thankfully the company allowed the script to be open sourced under the GPLv2+ and I used it as the basis for creating a project called Test-AutoBuild in ~2004. We expanded the code to cover many different SCM tools, maintain historical archives of builds to avoid rebuilding modules if no code had changed and many other things besides. I did a couple of releases a year for while, but it has been on the backburner for the last couple of years. With the increasing number of inter-related virtualization projects using to libvirt & KVM I decided it was time to put Test-AutoBuild back into use as a build server. Yes there are many of automated build systems in existence these days I could have chosen, but I was looking for an excuse to hack on mine again :-)

There was a quiet, mostly unannounced release 1.2.3 back at the start of August, primarily fix the utterly broken GIT support I originally wrote. A couple of weeks ago, immediately before going on holiday, I uploaded release 1.2.4 to the CPAN distribution page. Aside from fixing a number of horrible bugs, the 1.2.4 release brought in the ability to rsync the build results pages to a remote server, so now it is now possible to run the automated builds inside one (or more) private virtual machines and publish the results to a separate public webserver. The second major change was the incorporation of a new theme for the Test-AutoBuild project website and the build status pages. Previously we had used a pretty lame icon of a gear wheel as the logo and a fairly plain web site style. Looking around for some better ideas I happened to come across a proposal for a Fedora 10 Theme that was never taken up. Nicu Buculei and Máirín Duffy, who produced that artwork, were generous enough to grant me permission to use the graphics for Test-AutoBuild under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 and GPLv2+ licenses. Thus for the 1.2.4 release the status pages for the automated builds have been completely restyled and the project’s main website has been similarly updated.

With the 1.2.4 release out and updated RPMs pushed into Fedora, I’m now able to publish the results of the automated builds I run for nearly all the libvirt related virtualization projects. The builder currently runs in a Fedora 14 virtual machine. The plan is to install further virtual machines running important target OS, at the very least, Debian and one of the BSDs, so we can be sure we aren’t causing regressions in our codebases. If I’m feeling adventurous I might even setup a QEMU PPC instance to run some builds on a non-x86 architecture, though that will probably be painfully slow :-)