Platform indepent build environment suggestions

[Lars Chr. Hausmann]

Hey,

At my work I am in the middle of refactoring the build enviroment/build system (referred to as build environment in the rest of this mail) consiting of ant scripts, shell scripts etc. I was thinking that some of you might have had a similar task or done something, which can be of use to me. So I was hoping that I could get some good ideas.

I will try to sketch the current solution, and then the solution that I think would be the most optimal one, and maybe some of you could provide some input to whether that is feasible or you might have some other suggestions. (References would be fine as well).

Besides ant we use a lot of tools/utilies like jalophy, checkstyle, junit etc.

Currently, the developer does not need to setup anything on his machine, it is all done by one script. I.e. before running ant, a script is run that sets up classpath and other relevant environment variable for developer _including_ classpath to the tools that are being used. When the script has been run, the develop is free to use ant to compile and test his work.

The catch is that we're currently developing under windows (some under solaris) but it all has to be tested under solaris, so we have the ant files and we have two sets of scripts that sets up the environment (one set for windows and one set for solaris). It has (of course) turned out to be a nightmare to maintain these two sets and keep the synced. Futhermore some developers run the standard windows cmd.exe others run cygwin. So this all leads to a lot of files having to be maintained.

Therefore ...

I was wondering/hoping if it would be possible to just have to set ANT_HOME and then the all the rest could be handled by ant. I somehow doubt that it is doable since I figure that the classpath can not be modified when ant is running, so the classpath to our tools have to be set before running ant, or have I missed something ?

That is it would be ideal for me if I could scrap the setup files (.bat and unix shell scripts) and do it all with ant. Ant would then have to set up classpath and enviroment variables as the first thing it does. I have looked into .antrc and ant_{pre|post).bat, but I'd rather only have the ant XML files if it is possible.

Any comments/ideas ?

Best,

Lars Chr. Hausmann


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