[Anthill-pro] Anthill Pro best practices?

[Yanko, Curtis]

Chad,

I'd be happy to banter about any of it. Not sure we over lap a ton but
any info exchange can't be bad, right?

I don't really do your first item and even were we do we are using
Maven. My other multi component project has a monolithic layout and as
such I just CI each component and then do Push builds (up the tree) for
components that depend on the one I just made (which in turn may (push
further up).

Tagging and promoting is an interesting one. We don't use AHP beyond Dev
but we still tray and track QA and Prod so per my other thread we create
one stamp and then up the status (and replace the label in SVN). My big
issue in this area is one of signal-to-noise ratio's. If I am doing CI
(even if I'm not) and I label every build I end up with a ton labels
that have little or no value (most builds and even Dev deploys are
throwaway items IMO). Starting in QA (or Test) is where things get real.
Now we have a formal deliverable and something the enterprise is
interested in.

The whole tool chain thing may not map well into our world of Java but
it does seem to me that the basic approach of controlling the
environment via AHP is the way to go. We have very few if any
environment variable set on our build machines and set what we need via
Project properties. In Ant at least it is also very nice that it shows
the command environment that it is running in so we have a record.

We manage the files themselves in SVN, that way we can consistently move
them through our own environments.

I have to say that I haven't had much luck with a truly multi-platform
build. It seems like something always gets in the way and I have tailor
for one or the other.

Drop me a line any time.

===
-Curt
W: 860.702.9059
M: 860.881.2050

-----Original Message-----
From: anthill-pro-bounces at lists.urbancode.com
[mailto:anthill-pro-bounces at lists.urbancode.com] On Behalf Of Chad Loder
Sent: Thursday, January 10, 2008 4:18 PM
To: AnthillPro user and support list.
Subject: [Anthill-pro] Anthill Pro best practices?

Hello.

I will be implementing a continuous build and integration system for a
large scale Java product using Anthill Pro.  I have built a
proof-of-concept system using AHP and I will be scrapping this and
redoing things from scratch now that I have learned some of the quirks
of AHP and its capabilities.

I would like to ask the list for recommendations on best practices and
pitfalls to avoid (I suppose these are called anti-patterns these days).
Is there a collection of best practices already compiled? I could not
find one.

Specifically I would love to hear recommendations on:

* The optimal level of granularity for defining workflows and the
production of
  intermediate artifacts from each workflow (feeding artifacts from one
workflow
  to the next).

* Approaches to tagging and promoting builds through the various stages

* Adaptation of an existing multi-platform build system (using Ant on
both Linux
  and Windows+Cygwin) that depends on a large number of environment
variables and
  external tools, including not only the JDK but also a toolchain for
native
  libraries (either gcc or Microsoft Visual Studio).

  Much of the toolchain bootstrapping is done via Ant but there are
still many
  areas that must be configured manually (the native compilers and SDKs
must
  be installed of course). Can you share experiences on multi-platform
build systems
  using multiple agents on a complex project?

Thanks,
   Chad Loder
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