In August Productions

I've been making some improvements to our use of Hudson recently that have been really helpful.

The first was starting to use a set of parameterized builds. These use the Parameterized Trigger plugin, which allows you to pass parameters to triggered additional jobs when a job finishes. So using these we make a job which checks out the latest source (which should just about always succeed) and then fire off a whole host of jobs running on all of our build hosts. It has a single "build now" submit form which takes a bzr branch location as the branch to build. With this all of our developers can check their tree against the build farm before submitting the branch for merge.

That's great, but as we got more and more build hosts, we had to set up a job on each of them - and then having 4 machines which were all amd64 running Ubuntu 9.10 didn't help - it ran on all of them.

Enter PlatformLabeler

Robert Collins wrote a plugin for Hudson which checks a build slave for OS details when it connects (architecture, OS and OS Release) and adds Labels to the slave based on the values it finds. With that - instead of targetting a job to say, hades.inaugust.com, I can target that job to x64_64-Mac-10.4.1. I can easily see both platform coverage, and I can take advantage of having multiple machines with the same config, since it'll run the job on only one of them sharing that label. 

The next problem with that setup is that there is not a tight binding between the parent and child jobs. You can see that the parent job triggered the child, but you can't really get a single snapshot of "how did this job work everywhere?" If you're doing this pre-merge request, it might be nice to get a URL you can refer to saying "hey! check it out, it worked"

Enter Matrix Builds.

Matrix Builds are a single job. They allow you to define how you run the job, and then you can select which hosts to run it on. You can also set up arbitrary sets of flags and hudson will build a grid. So in our case, I set up a job (shortened for brevity)

 ./config/autorun.sh

 ./configure

 make distcheck

Then I told hudson to build it both with and without the --with-debug flag to configure, and on a set of our build hosts. Now when I kick it off, I get a page with an overview of how that particular build went. Also, having one build description means I don't accidentally do something different on one host.

Matrix Builds also have a nice feature for a sentinel or canary build, which let you build first on a host where you're pretty darned sure it's going to build, and then build everywhere else. In our case, if it doesn't build on 64-bit Ubuntu 9.10, it's very unlikely to build anywhere, so we don't bother trying. 

I still use the Parameterized Trigger from the Matrix build to kick of jobs for things like Valgrind and Sysbench when the build completes cleanly. Those jobs themselves can be launched independently (if you only wanted to check how valgrind is treating your new branch)

Moving forward, I would love to migrate our main set of build branches to Matrix builds, but Matrix currently lacks support for launching an individual sub-build. If it doesn't show up soon, perhaps I'll add it... ah the joy of open source! 

See the Hudson link at http://hudson.drizzle.org/view/Drizzle-param/job/drizzle-param/ for more details and examples.

Any good piece of infrastructure software should be able to pop up little windows on your desktop. :)

Yesterday at LCA in Stewart's Hacking Drizzle talk, it occurred to me that error messages should pop up little windows on my desktop. So I wrote an error message plugin which uses libnotifymm to send Gnome pop-up window messages.

I don't always get to post screenshots, so here you go:

Friday was my last day working for Sun Microsystems, which means it was also the end of the job that started when I was hired by MySQL, Inc a little over four years ago. For those of you who didn't know me before that, it should be noted that the other than periods of time when I have started companies and worked for myself, the next longest I've ever been with one company was 10 months. I mention that as one of the few quantifiable metrics I could cite in describing what a wonderful experience it has been to work for MySQL and then Sun. The people I've worked with have been nothing short of stellar.

I will be continuing my work as a core Drizzle developer, so this blog post notwithstanding, I doubt most people will notice the change. The only real outward difference I can think of is that now that I'm not a Sun employee, I am free to comment on the merger and on what some people see as the need to save MySQL from Oracle. I don't know if I will, but at least now I can.

I would say I will miss everyone, but I imagine I will continue to see most people with about the same frequency as before. One of the wonderful things about the Open Source world is that changes in business and legal entities don't often have very much effect on the coding that we do day in and day out... so let's keep up the good work everybody! See you on IRC...