[oi-dev] Distribution build system

[Chris Ridd]

On 16 Mar 2011, at 16:34, Alan Coopersmith wrote:

> On 03/16/11 09:12 AM, Chris Ridd wrote:
>> FWIW at work we have an XML file describing each release as (essentially) a number of git repos + tags to checkout, and then what script to run to build each given repo. Our overall build script goes through that XML in order, and is able to do "the right thing". This gives us pretty reproducible releases.
> 
> Sounds very much like jhbuild, which is often used to build projects
> like GNOME & X.Org with dozens or hundreds of individual modules to
> checkout and build.
> 
> http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/jhbuild

Yes, that seems somewhat similar. jhbuild looks like it has some builtin support for running as a buildbot slave, so if we also want a continuous build system then it could be useful for that too.

The only downside I can see is that the jhbuild configuration file format is not very formally structured (eg XML). That means it is harder to do a few things like mechanically generate new release files based on another file (eg create a snapshot release based on the stable branch), or compare different release files, but that may not be a big problem.

Thanks for the link!

Chris