Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Continuous Integration for KDE

Dancing Building
 “The loftier the building, the deeper must the foundation be laid.” - Thomas Kempis.

Long time no blog. Today we announce the expansion of build.kde.org - now providing continuous integration to all KDE main modules on Git, for both the current development and stable branches. It also executes the tests each project has - and builds are triggered when pushes are made to git.kde.org.

Please check the status of projects you are involved or interested with there to make sure things are working properly. If you find anything wrong, please let us know. If you want to keep an eye on builds in general, I recommend visiting http://build.kde.org/view/All/builds.

Thanks go to Torgny Nyblom for writing the fantastic suite of scripts which do the heavy lifting required to make all that just work - it wouldn't be possible to do this without them.

For those interested in the technical details: each project (apart from the external dependencies) is installed into a separate prefix, and ccache is used to accelerate builds. To make sure tests run smoothly, Xvfb and kdeinit4 are launched to create a environment suitable for running tests. However - only those dependencies which projects explicitly list in the kde-build-metadata file are available to them for both the build and tests.