Kohsuke Kawaguchi's Blog: Make your builds always available

Kohsuke Kawaguchi's Blog: Make your builds always available:

When you are working on a software project, often you have other people who need to access the builds. For example, here at Sun when I work with the JAXB RI, our builds need to be handed to the quality assurance team, the TCK team, the JAX-RPC RI team, and other miscellaneous people who use the JAXB RI internally.

For many of them, this hand-off of a build is not just one time thing. It is a continuous on-going process. For example, the QA team needs a new build once we fix a bug they reported. During the lifetime of a project, this cycle happens a lot.

For this reason, it is often convenient to have a standard distribution channel of your builds, where people can always get the latest build. It is even better if there’s a permanent link to the latest build, because often other teams have their own procedure of integrating a build
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Hudson can also be used to monitor jobs that run externally. I have many cron jobs, and I hook them all up to Hudson, Hudson records the output from a job, keeps history of past runs, and produce RSS feeds. Once I see a failure, I can go to Hudson, browse all the outputs I need to see, and find out when it started to fail. I found this to be a lot easier than going through e-mails from cron.

I will like to try this tool and see if it can be integrated in the nightly builds we make, I think it will be very valuable.