Build Farm

We use Hudson for automated build and test.

The dashboard is at http://build.willowgarage.com.

For the developer

During the automated build, Hudson runs rosmakeall, which builds and tests every package in the tree. rosmakeall is similar to rosmake, except that it will skip any package that contains a file called ROS_BUILD_BLACKLIST. This file is used to mark packages that are known to be broken, and therefore should be excluded from the build.

The goal is for the automated build to always succeed; it should fail only when a bug is introduced. Blacklisted packages are excluded from the build in order to allow the build to succeed without them, and only report failure (via web interface and email) when a package that's expected to build becomes broken.

The ROS_BUILD_BLACKLIST file is usually added by the Hudson admin, after it is seen that the package repeatedly fails to build, and the package maintainer doesn't fix the bug. If you find this file in your package, it's because your package is broken. Shame on you! But there's hope! Look in the ROS_BUILD_BLACKLIST file to find links to the output from a broken build, plus potentially links to relevant Trac tickets.

If you believe that you've fixed your broken package, then svn delete and svn commit the ROS_BUILD_BLACKLIST file. Your package will be built in the next run.

For the administrator

See http://home.willowgarage.com/wgwiki/Servers/hudson (internal access only).