So we've had alot of recent build breaks, IIRC, this is the third day
in a row. In most cases, these breaks are caused by something that
got overlooked, either forgetting to check in files, publishing
snapshots, etc.. Though these issues are small, they tend to cause
disruption and block day to day progression. These break-ages can be
easily avoided with people being more careful and taking necessary
steps to prevent this.
(1) If there are changes to external dependencies, make sure these
dependencies are published prior to commiting. Many of us are
committers in other projects and the tendency is to rely on locally
built snapshots of those rather then published snapshots.
(2) Make sure you're committing all necessary files if new files are
introduced. To ensure this, if that means doing a new checkout and
build of the tree to ensure that nothing got missed, then this would
be good habit :)
(3) Always try to do a full build. I know sometimes is easy to
think, hey this is a one line change, it won't break anything, but I
think its better to take these types of protective measures. I think
taking an additional 15-20 minutes by each of us to first build is
well worth the time to avoid the hours it can take to resolve the
simplest of build breaks.
(4) Periodically everyone should run builds with clean repositories
so we can catch any overlooked dependency issues early.
Is there anything else that we can do to minimize breakage's?
Thanks.
-sachin
