[csw-maintainers] raw "build" api for our subversion tree now up for discussion

[Maciej (Matchek) Blizinski]

On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 5:38 PM, Philip Brown <phil at bolthole.com> wrote:
> Ok, so we have previously had the issue raised, of a standard api for
> builds, to allow things to be checked into our subversion tree, that
> do NOT use the gar build system.
>
> I have now taken a step towards getting this official, by writing up
> the following:
>
> http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/gar/wiki/RawAPI

Thanks for doing that!

> Please note that the prior suggestion on the mailing list, was to have
> the top entrypoint be "build". However, in order to avoid potential
> conflicts with "upstream", yet still keep it relatively short, I
> thought we should call it "cswbuild".

Looks good to me.

> I think the rest is fairly self-explanitory and obvious. There are a
> few things that most definately should be discussed.
> One is of course, if there are objections to that name.
> Another, is whether the "mandatory support" section is too small.

I that the main mandatory requirement should be that the packages
which are sent to the release manager must be built using this api, on
a clean filesystem, on the buildfarm:

svn co http://repo-url/pkg/foo
cd foo
./cswbuild

> Another, is the issue of "where does the result go"?

A couple of options:

- the same directory as the script
- a subdirectory with a standard name
- a directory specified in an environment variable
- a directory specified in a configuration file on disk

> I am not familiar with how "gar" does it. Perhaps people who are
> already familiar with gar, will suggest good ways to make the two
> somewhat consistent, while at the same time, resisting the urge to try
> to turn this into gar ;-)

It's specified in ~/.garrc, I don't think it's a good location for the
general solution. Perhaps a more general configuration file in the
home directory would do the trick?

> Please note, that the overall goal of this, is to encourage people
> whose source code is not in subversion, to migrate it into subversion
> with a minimum of change.
> Therefore, people in that category are the ones most strongly
> encouraged to take part in this discussion.

Are there any other build systems in use in our project? If so, is
their source code publicly available?

Maciej