Ludovic's weblog

Some of you might be interested in our build process and the tools we use here to make venice.
svn
So for most of our code we use svn - as it is similar to cvs and is quite popular, the learning curve is quite simple (and not as complicated as something like git). Plus having a few people wearing T-shirts with r8810 (ain't sure about the exact number) in the company also helps - for those not knowing that's the revision of svn 1.0. Meaning that we have a few contributors of svn working with us.Which is vrey nice because svn being a tool, we do encounter a few issues with it.
Buildbot
We use the buildbot for our automated build farms at least for everything client related. We've hit the bugs about killing processes, meaning that once a build is started you can't stop it which kinda sucks sometimes - because you know that what is being built is useless. A solution for that kill problem has being implemented so I hope it will be integrated to newer versions of buildbot. The user interface of Buildbot is web driven - and the output looks like tinderboxes , green when build is correct - red when it fails - yellow while it works. I kind like that interface. Launching a build is a simple process - and you can even configure builds on the fly - which I find rather a nice thing. Another point I like about build bot is that you have build steps. And that is a very convenient feature has those can be added or removed, by the build master in editing a simple configuration file. So a build is usually a clean - step one , a checkout of the source - step 2, a compile step3, now you can add various unit test phases - and that is the flexibility I like about that tool.