Re: [buckminster-dev] Hudson plugin and provisioning

[Johannes Utzig <mail@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

sorry, I check my inbox before I checked the newsgroup, so I sent my 
answer directly to your mail address instead of to the newsgroup...

So here's a copy of the mail I sent you earlier for everyone to read:

Hi Thomas,

this is actually something I was already thinking about myself.
Hudson has a thing called a 'Tool Installation' which is a generic
description of any kind of build tool that a build can depend on.
That includes things like ANT, Maven, JDK,...
For some Tools there is an automatic tool installation available which 
usually means download something from somewhere and install it.
Having the same thing for Buckminster would have several advantages:
-Easier to configure for the user
-Easy to update/upgrade buckminster
-And most of all, this would enable master/slave scenarios. If a build 
is executed on a slave machine and relies on a tool that has an 
automatic installation available, it can check if this tool is already 
installed and install it on the fly if necessary. This is a great 
feature if you have something like a build cloud where new slaves get 
added on demand.

So in my opinion it would be better to participate in the logic provided 
by hudson instead of doing it plugin-internal during the build run. What 
is your opinion on that?

As for the 'how', does this sound ok to you? :
In 'Configure Hudson' you have 3 options:
1. enter a location to a buckminster installation (that's how it works
currently)
2. pick a version and install a default buckminster automatically 
(pretty much all the features on the headless update site I would say)
3. provide a list of update sites and features to be installed

If 2. or 3. gets picked and hudson detects a missing tool installation, 
the plugin would download the director application
(http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/download.php?file=/tools/buckminster/products/director_latest.zip) 
and then provision a buckminster runtime with the defined set of 
features. I'm not sure yet how an update would work with such a Tool 
Installation but I'm sure I can find out about that...

About the wiki:
yes, the complete hudson wiki seems to be down at the moment. Their 
infrastructure (SVN, wiki, ...) is a bit fragile in times... I'm sure it 
will be on again in a few hours or so.

Thanks for your input on this, I definetly do agree that this would make
things a lot easier for the user.
As for the question how hard it would be, I don't know yet (the 
documentation on automatic tool installation is unfortunately very sparse)
but I can give it a shot in a few days and hopefully tell you more about it.


Best regards,
Johannes