Category Archives: Software Development

Publishing CruiseControl Automated Build Results on a Weblog

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Lasse Koskela has implemented a CruiseControl Publisher that supports the Weblog API.

This is an interesting concept. Managing your build system through weblog software. I’m interested in seeing how this would work and what effect blogging software could have on the productivity / mind sharing activities in a development team. This might be something I need to prototype somewhere.

We already use Wiki software as a documentation tool, and home grown build management software for the rest of the system, however I’m kind of interested in how WordPress could be used in the same environment. Using “prepackaged” open source software for the activities surrounding a build / development team could cut out a lot of cost in software maintenance related to internal systems.

Some additional benefits I see from using this type of software as the central development hub “intranet”:

  • Ability to post system notifications for hardware / patch maintenance
  • One place to go for build notifications (get them out of email!)
  • Ability to automagically post system upgrades or software deployments to the central site
  • Ability for individual developers to post ideas or links to proof of concept software prototypes
  • … I know there are more, but I have to dwell on it some more

Cobertura – Java Test Coverage Tool

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As a note to myself, I found a reference to Cobertura this morning as I was reading through the CruiseControl mailing list. Cobertura is a tool to calculate the percentage of code accessed by tests (test coverage).

According to the FAQ, this is a fork of the jcoverage tool, with “prettier reports” and a more open development process.

A sample report is also provided on their web site. It does look pretty cool, and would be a nice addition to an automated build system.

As an aside, a developer from the project has also developed a PHP based reporting front end for CruiseControl. The developer states that the “ugly” source code can be found in his CVS repository in the web module.

Whether the code is ugly or not, it’s definitely a start on integrating PHP based build management systems like SourceForge with CruiseControl.

SVK 1.0 Beta 2 released.

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Yesterday, the release of SVK 1.0 Beta 2 was announced .

The announcements list the following changes since Beta 1:

  • Fix keyword translation for undesired characters. [matthewd]
  • Fix svk switch from a removed branch.
  • Don’t trust LML would return a valid encoding that Encode knows. [Eric Gillespie ]
  • Recognize merge-conflict error, so no stacktrace for it.
  • svk info now skips files not under version control. [#8220] [gugod]
  • Fix locked mirror messages.
  • Various pool usage fixes.

The software can be downloaded from the SVK download area.

Subversion 1.2 Release Candidate 1 released

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The Subversion team has released the first release candidate of the 1.2 product. Detailed release notes are also available, explaining the new features.

The features explained in summary in the release notes include:

  • new locking feature (exclusive locks)
  • full WebDAV autoversioning
  • faster binary decompression
  • a large number of improved API’s

You can find the source tarball on the download site. View the actual announcement on the announcement mailing list archive.

It looks like the official Subversion Source Repository is already running this version.

Subversion Team Posts Open Letter To Developers

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The Subversion team has posted an open letter to open source developers asking them to “stop bugging Linus Torvalds About Subversion”.

This letter comes out on the heels of Linus’ decision to stop using BitKeeper due to Bitmover, Inc’s decision to stop providing a free version of Bitkeeper for open source development.

There is a pretty detailed article on KernelTrap explaining the decision on BitMovers part.

Apparently, Linus is thinking about using a tool called Monotone which, quite frankly, looks pretty interesting.

Related Articles:

Subversion 1.1.4 released.

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It was announced yesterday that version 1.1.4 of the Subversion Version Control System has been released. According to the announcement, the following changes were made for this release:

Version 1.1.4
(1 April 2005, from /branches/1.1.x)
http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/tags/1.1.4

User-visible-changes:
– Client:
* fixed: win32 not ignoring versioned symlinks (issue #2173)
* fixed: ‘svn merge’ can cause broken working copy (issue #2222)
* fixed: ‘svn commit’ fails when schedule-delete dir has local mod (r11980)
* fixed: ‘svn st -u nonexistent_file’ segfault (issue #2127)
* fixed: ‘svn cp wc wc’ utf8 conversion error (r13111)
* fixed: confusing error message about “wc not locked” (issue #2174)
* many translation updates for localized client messages

– Server:
* fixed: nasty (though unusual) performance bug in FSFS commits (r13222-3)
* fixed: FSFS memory leak when auto-merging large tree (r13193)
* fixed: FSFS memory leak in ‘svnadmin hotcopy’ (r13218, 13465, 13468)
* fixed: FSFS segfault when encountering empty data reps (r13683)
* fixed: two dataloss bugs in svndumpfilter (r12630, r12636)
* fixed: wasteful memory usage in svndumpfilter (r12637, r12640)
* fixed: mod_dav_svn segfaults when client sends bogus paths (issue #2199)

– Both:
* fixed: (win32) retry file operation if sharing violation (r12983, r12986)

Developer-visible-changes:
* add SWIG 1.3.24 and .25 compatibility (r12551, r12717-9, r12722, r13504)
* make mailer.py work on win32 (r12499, r12542, r12670)
* fixed: JavaHL run-time link error (r12576), path/url cleanups (r13090)
* fixed: python bindings log_receiver failure with SWIG 1.3.24 (r13487)
* build system tweaks: add install dependencies for fs & fs_base (r11050)

You can get the source tarballs for this release from the download area.