bliki tagged by: build scripting
BuildLanguage
Bruce Eckel's recent post on ant and make triggered me to share some of my thoughts about build languages. Both ant and make specify how builds happen, they are a language for describing builds. Both are pretty widely used and have been successful. Yet both run into limitations, with larger systems it's quite common to find people generating their ant/make files from other programs.
17 January 2004
ReproducibleBuild
One of the prevailing assumptions that fans of Continuous Integration have is that builds should be reproducible. By this we mean that at any point you should be able to take some older version of the system that you are working on and build it from source in exactly the same way as you did then.
30 November 2010
OutputBuildTarget
In the past few days I've been reviewing an in-progress article by a Julian Simpson, a colleague of mine, on refactoring ant files. Julian is one our "deployment dudes" who've been responsible for applying our agile-oriented work habits to the deployment of systems. In doing this Julian has run into more than his fair share of gnarly ant build scripts. His article is a nice description of some his favorite ways to clean up the mess.
26 April 2007
TouchFile
When doing builds using make, you determine whether you need to
do work by comparing the modificiaton dates of the output file and
the input files. For things like compiling (a.out depends of foo.c)
this works well, but sometimes the output is harder to see.
26 April 2007