+1 on the free license - but what are the conditions on its use? Obviously any continuous build system will have to be hosted on some equipment. How many installations is the license offer good for? If an instance is to be hosted inside the company which employs one of the contributors what are the implications...
I have discussed offline with a couple of the guys from RedHat that they will be having their own continuous build machine, which they could configure to mail the group with build/test failures. We only want one continuous build machine doing this or we'll be spamming ourselves unnecessarily. On the other hand the RedHat guys may not want to go the the expense of hosting tests on other platforms / operating systems :-) things that might be more important to those of us who work in a heterogeneous environment. Cheers, Rob On 06/03/07, Rupert Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I have tried out a few different build servers. I started by looking at this feature matrix (probably not entirely complete or up to date): http://damagecontrol.codehaus.org/Continuous+Integration+Server+Feature+Matrix As you can see there are two that have more green ticks than the others. Anthill Pro and Viewtier Parabuild. I tried both. Anthill Pro looks very good (maven build running on my machine, configured in 18 minutes!). Parabuild looked pretty awfull. Anthill Pro have offered to give us a free licence as they do this for open source projects. The Apache Geronimo project has already set the precedent by also using Anthill Pro 3. They've had their own debate, around the subject of wether or not they should be using non-free, non-open source software and whether or not using it will force people building from a checkout to also use it. Read the debate here: http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/geronimo-dev/200612.mbox/ajax/[EMAIL PROTECTED] To summarize: It won't force people to be dependant on anthill, because the build server and build system are seperate things. The build system is maven, make, msbuild etc. All anthill does is call it periodically to do the build. The build system will still need to be maintained and kept in working order for every day devlopment activity from the command line. As for non-free, non-os software. We already use Jira, Confluence, not to mention MsBuild and Visual Studio, which kind of takes the moral argument out of that point of view. I'd like to propose that we accept Urban Code's kind offer of a free licence. Their product is the only one which can do a fully automated build over multiple languages and operating systems, call our test scripts and collate the results. Rupert
