Hello everybody,
I would like to share the following user story / use case description with you, hoping that some of you might have some hints for how put an appropriate system into practice.
We are developing a small component-oriented client/server application based on Eclipse Equinox, RCP, and RAP which is constantly growing (components are changed and new ones are added). The individual components' API is also far from stable and thus version numbering of components itself and their exported packages is also constantly changing.
Currently, we build the entire application on our Jenkins buildserver with Eclipse Tycho using a reactor project referring the individual components. There's a continuous integration build job which runs on every commit on one of the components, and a nightly build job which builds the entire application on a nightly base.
We would now like to move to a more mature and component-oriented way of building the system and its individual releases. The ideas for our release management system are as follows:
Development on the individual components is done on the TRUNK stream. About four times a year, a release of the entire system (including all its components at the particular point of time) is created. The TRUNK stream is branched and a complete build is triggered. The result of this build becomes the base repository of the release (i.e. the set of components forming the release). Main development continues on the TRUNK stream, but the new release stream is also maintained. This means, new versions of individual components (with changes in minor and micro segment) are created and need to be built for individual shipment to the customer using the corresponding release.
Unfortunately, we did not yet find a way to put all this into practice with a Tycho- and possibly Nexus-based build system. We would need to build components individually at least for the release maintenance streams, but probably also for the TRUNK stream. While this is possible to a certain degree with Tycho (assuming that all dependencies can be resolved via the local Maven repository), we need to make the build components available for consumption by the system deployer. One idea is to deploy them into a Nexus repository, but this seem a little awkward as Tycho cannot consume those repositories and also access to it is not that straightforward for the system deployer for downloading individual components. Another idea is to host p2 repositories on a web server, but those cannot be built incrementally, i.e. every single build of a component needs to build the entire application keeping all unaffected components in the same version which introduces a lot of redundancy...
So far we did not find an appropriate approach that fits all our requirements. Maybe you guys do have any idea or hint?
Thank you for any comment.
Timo
