Some questions about nant

joejoe2010

Good morning everybody,

I looked into OpenPetra.build and have some questions about it.

if nant buildRelease is called then either buildReleaseWindows or buildReleaseLinux is called according to the current platform in use.
I can see that both targets execute different commands. Would it be possible to create a release for linux on a Windows-platform and wise versa (in order to not having to switch between 2 computers) or is it necessary to have a linux machine for building a linux release (and wise versa)?
what is the difference between clean, quickClean and cleanPetra? When should I use which one?
when should patchDatabase be called?
is there a general overview or a diagram about which target is called by which?

Thank you

Joachim

pokorra

Hello Joachim,

These are good questions, and will be interesting for others as well.

- if nant buildRelease is called then either buildReleaseWindows or buildReleaseLinux is called according to the current platform in use.
I can see that both targets execute different commands. Would it be possible to create a release for linux on a Windows-platform and wise versa (in order to not having to switch between 2 computers) or is it necessary to have a linux machine for building a linux release (and wise versa)?

buildReleaseWindows uses InnoSetup, which does not run on Linux. The alternative would be to use Nullsoft Installer, there are Debian packages for that. I did some experiments, but could not get it to work in the short time I had for the experiment.
buildReleaseLinux uses symbolic links for the tar.gz file, I think. And building RPM or DEB packages from Windows would not work either.
So I guess, the easiest is to build on the system where it should work in the end.

- what is the difference between clean, quickClean and cleanPetra? When should I use which one?

clean walks through all directories, and cleans all the files by name. quickClean deletes certain directories, and certain files by their extension. So clean is very thorough, but quickClean is faster but might forget a few files. cleanPetra is just a combination of clean and quickClean. I don't know if clean forgets files that quickClean deletes? Perhaps Thias knows more about this.

when should patchDatabase be called?

When we make a new release, we increase the development version to an odd number, eg. 0.2.9, in db/patches/version.txt. If something changes in the database structure, we should implement this in the patch sql files in db/patches. nant patchDatabase will call that patch sql file, and update the version number in the database. This is necessary, because the OpenPetra server validates the version number of the code against the version number of the database. We want to use the same version number for both.
Each developer has to run nant patchDatabase, when we upgrade the repository for the next release. Otherwise you would need to recreate and reset the database, but would lose your own test data.

is there a general overview or a diagram about which target is called by which?

Not that I knew of.

Timotheus

thiasg

Hello,

since my name was already mentioned, I just wanted to add my thoughts...

joejoe2010 wrote
if nant buildRelease is called then either buildReleaseWindows or buildReleaseLinux is called according to the current platform in use.
I can see that both targets execute different commands. Would it be possible to create a release for linux on a Windows-platform and wise versa (in order to not having to switch between 2 computers) or is it necessary to have a linux machine for building a linux release (and wise versa)?

Timotheus answered this one already. I would like to add, that a defined build environment like a build server would be helpful for generating a release. In the company environment I worked in the past, the build server doing the integration builds had a special build target for building and testing the release.
In the moment this would also involve a build server running with the Windows OS.

joejoe2010 wrote
what is the difference between clean, quickClean and cleanPetra? When should I use which one?

nant clean normally does the job. But if you deleted already directories or files in the delivery directory by hand or aborted a clean run at a certain point of time or removed yaml files, then nant clean is not running anymore or not deleting all files. In this cases nant quickClean helps often removing stalled files. nant quickClean on the other hand does not remove all files, which nant clean finds. Also nant clean could be run in all directories for removing only parts in contrast to nant quickClean.

nant cleanPetra is a left over from old days for compatibility reasons. I do not know, why it does execute both...

joejoe2010 wrote
is there a general overview or a diagram about which target is called by which?

No, there is not. In General the developer should not need to know the internals. Of course, sometimes it is helpful to know, how things are interacting... ;)

If you want to change something, then it is always helpful to look into it or just ask myself or Timotheus.

Hope that helps...

ThiasG