[Discuss] Remote builds (Re: SVN server - What hardware do I need?)

[warlord at MIT.EDU (Derek Atkins)]

"Rich Braun" <richb at pioneer.ci.net> writes:

> In 2013, I changed jobs and am faced with the same toolchain (but this time on
> a django/python stack instead of java/tomcat; the sooner I can evict PyPI's
> 'pip install' from the building the happier I and everyone else will be!). 
> For whatever reason, Jenkins or an equivalent build server hadn't yet been
> implemented so I've got a greenfield project and authorization to yank out
> whatever I want to yank out (assuming I can persuade developers to go
> along....;-)
>
> Right now, developers are expected to spend their first days (perhaps a couple
> of weeks) wrestling with getting a couple of VMs set up with vagrant on their
> MacBooks, dealing with permissions issues, and using that mess of code to
> install other masses of code on a dozen different Amazon EC2 instances.

Jenkins is pretty cool for system builds, but I'm not sure how well it
works for developer build & test builds.  Unless you have Jenkins set up
such that each developer has their only build chain I still feel (as a
developer) that I need more control over my local build & test prior to
"commit/push".  I.e., I want to be able to do a "local" build and run my
own local tests and debugging before I push my changes to a place where
others pick them up.  I have not seen a Jenkins install/configuration
that supports that.

Jenkins is great for building feature branches, release branches, and
running automated packaging and testing.  But I don't think it works
well for a developer build+test cycle where you might need to run
through a dozen or two compile & test cycles to make sure you've fixed
your bug.

In short, I think developers still need their own build (and test)
environments locally.

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available