[Anthill-announce] ANN: Anthill Pro 2.4.0 Available

[Maciej Zawadzki]

Version 2.4.0 of Anthill Pro is now available. This is a significant
release with new features and many bug fixes.  For additional stability,
we have added an option to have the settings saved to an embedded
database. An updated look and some changes to the page flow improves the
user experience. We are also pleased to introduce support for a new
source control system, BitKeeper. The complete list of changes is below.

You can download this latest release at
https://www.urbancode.com/products/anthillpro/secure/protected/download.jsp

Thanks,
-- The Anthill Team

New Features:

#451 New Subversion Driver
- The Subversion driver did not copy the 'tagged' builds to the location
expected according to Subversion best practices. A new Subversion driver
was added that does. A new driver was required because changing
strategies breaks backwards compatibility and the team wanted to give
users taking advantage of the 'Rebuild' functionality the choice of
staying with the less ideal tagging strategy. The new Subversion driver
is named "Subversion (New)" while the old one has been renamed
"Subversion (Deprecated)".

#475 Multiple build queue assigned by project
AND
#500 Disallow parallel execution of multiple build tracks of the same
project
- Projects can be configured so that no two build tracks under it can be
building at the same time. While this is normally not needed, some
builds require exclusive access to an outside resource. This addition
will make it easy for organizations with these types of projects to use
multiple build pipelines.

#510     Override source control command templates with custom
implementations
- The command templates that control the commands issued to source
control may now be modified. This gives each company control over
decisions regarding which flags are used on commands among other things.
As of release time, a document describing this feature in more depth is
being edited. In the meantime, please mail the Anthill Pro mailing list
or support at urbancode.com if you are interested in using this feature.

#539     Add database persistence
- The persistence strategy can be changed from File System persistence
to database backed persistence on the Main Settings page. The database
is an Apache Derby database stored in the conf directory. Urbancode
still recommends backing up the conf directory on a regular basis.

#532     BitKeeper Driver
- We are pleased to begin official support for the BitKeeper source
control system. Anthill Pro now supports eleven source control systems,
some with multiple drivers.

#556     Send reports out as email attachments
- Additional reports may be sent out with emails as attachments. Used in
conjunction with the file based report templates (see improvement #521),
sending out large log files should no longer incur drastic performance
penalties. Emails can also be enhanced in general. Instead of containing
links and several logs, the body of the email could be short and clean
while each log is attached as a separate report.

#558     Include an option to activate Directory Publisher retention policy
- To date, the 'builds to keep' section in the directory publisher has
only had an effect if the builds were being published to the intranet.
Optionally, these values can now be used to manage builds published to a
directory using the ${version} tag.

#559     Update the Anthill Pro look and feel
- The look and feel of Anthill Pro has been updated with a cleaner look
and less confusing page flow.


Improvements:

#403     Put Drop Downs in Alphabetical Order
- We noted the haphazard listing of items in drop down boxes as a major
usability concern. These items are now listed alphabetically throughout
the app.

#487     Abort functionality should have permissions at the build level
not view
- If Authorization is enabled, only users authorized to start builds on
a given build track are given the option of killing those builds.

#518     My browser download utility doesn't know the size of Intranet
downloads
- Now it does

#521     Velocity templates need memory-sensitive update
- Added a fileReaderHelper to the context and supporting macros to
example velocity templates to address runaway memory usage in large reports.

#549     Adding new default reports that are HTML based.
- Added HTML example reports as an example of how to create more
sophisticated reports.

#555     File System Driver Treats Repository Branch As SubDirectory
- Updated the file system driver to treat the repository branch setting
as a sub directory. This is handy when there are a number of minor
projects under a single directory. Several branches can be used to
manage these instead of being forced to create multiple projects.

Bugs:

#356     Anthill Pro loses web-application context
- On occasion, particularly during restart, Anthill Pro would lose track
of its URL context causing links within the application to malfunction.
This no longer occurs.

#446     Can't logout after certain operations (setting counters /
utility options)
- Logout would fail from time to time under the default Authentication
strategy. This has been corrected in default strategy and the container
managed form based authentication strategy.

#452     Forced builds blocked by unforced builds
- In order to prevent the build queue from being overrun by multiple
build requests for the same build track, Anthill Pro had been rejecting
build requests for builds already in the build queue. This led to the
odd situation where a forced build request would be denied access
because an unforced request was already present. The build might not
happen. Now all forced build requests are admitted to the queue. An
additional check is added to prevent actually building two requests for
the same build track at the same time. The second request to arrive will
wait for the first to complete.

#468     Real time log display causes extremely high CPU utilization
- Large log files, for instance CVS revision logs, when viewed in
progress could cause crippling performance problems. This has been resolved.

#490     Maven builder's 'Base Directory' field cannot be cleared
- This optional field, once set, could not be unset. This has been resolved.

#498     Error decreasing build daemon number
- There was an interface issue when decreasing the build daemon number
while all build daemons are in use. The build would disappear from the
Now Building list. While the build would complete normally, it vanishing
from the UI was disconcerting. Now build daemons remain visible in the
interface as long as they are building something.

#504     Email Build Contributors reports an error when there are no matches
- When a build track using the Email Build Contributors module was built
and no revisions with users matching those in the mapping strategy were
found, the listener logged an error. This situation is expected in many
circumstances and is not always an error. It is now logged at the INFO
level and does not provide a stack trace.

#506     Incremental Build Manager Miscounts
- The Incremental build manager behaved as though one more incremental
build had been done than had actual executed. This has been resolved.

#507     Subversion driver does not accurately fetch revisions
- The subversion log command returned revisions that it should not have.
Anthill Pro had been trusting that command to provide only the revisions
requested. It now filters out revisions that were not requested. This
should make Subversion more usable in a Continuous Integration environment.

#508     Incremental builds with tags could be problematic
- The team noticed that building from a tag in an Incremental Build
Manager might be problematic in conjunction with some source control
systems. Now building from a tag with the Incremental Build Manager
always builds clean.

#519     Clearcase Base (use existing view) fails label
- Under some circumstances, this driver failed the label step. This is
corrected.

#522     Empty build label ant property interferes with Build date property
AND
#523     Ant Builder properties not passed correctly   - Build
properties with no value were being passed to the command line causing
the following properties to not be made available to Ant properly. Now
empty properties are not passed to Ant.

#524     Work Directory Naming is sometimes wrong
- The working directory calculation was inconsistent in some situations.
This has been corrected.

#527    Labeling problems corrected
- There were a number of problems related to the translation of version
numbers into labels. Some of these problems impacted the rebuild
functionality, others interfered with user scripted translations and
others simply over translated the label. A series of related fixes
cleaned these issues up.

#528     Clearcase driver does not update config spec correctly after
building from a label
- The Clearcase driver using an existing view would pollute that build
with any label it was instructed to build from. This driver now reverts
to the views original label (or the head) after building from a label.

#531     File based Versioning + Changeset Revisions could have revision
detection problems
- For drivers using Changeset Revisions (BitKeeper, Perfoce and
Subversion) any changeset containing a change to file used by File Based
Versioning would not be detected. This has been changed so that only
changesets that only contain changes to the version file are ignored.

#535     Mailing lists are not copied
- When a module containing a mailing list was copied, the reference to
the mailing list did not come along for the ride. Now it does.

#536     EmailVCSMap not copied in build notifier
- When a build notifier containing a mapping between emails and source
control user names was copied, that mapping was not present in the new
notifier. This has been corrected.

#537     Perforce does not handle views with spaces well
- The Peforce driver can now handle view names that contain spaces.

#543     CVS driver fails with CVS 1.12.9+
- Our friends at CVS changed their log file formats causing Anthill Pro
confusion. Anthill Pro can now read both old and new style CVS revision
logs.

#552     Different builds can sometimes have the same Build ID
- When multiple builds are built simultaneously, they could be given the
same 'unique' id. That was somewhat problematic and clearly wrong. It no
longer occurs.

#554     Logging cross-contamination from concurrent builds
- If multiple builds were executing in the same kind of module at the
same time, their logs could get mixed up. This has been corrected.