Joe McMahon did a nice talk tonite at the San Francisco Perl Mongers (sf.pm.org) on the Hudson continuous integration server.
Hudson is written in Java, but can be used with any programming language (or documentation generator) where Makefile or JUNIT output is available.
He’s been happy with the included features so far. One of the features he’d like to try next is spawning a VM from Hudson.
As a Java application, it can be fairly memory-intensive. Hudson plus 400,000 tests requires about 4 GB RAM.
Although most Perl modules don’t require a compile-link step, CI can still be useful for Perl programs to:
- automatically test across multiple platforms
- automatically run test suites
- integrate code from multiple developers
- record build results in a common location for later analysis.
Joe also talked about cleaning up the output of Devel::Cover by excluding CPAN modules.
I mentioned during the Q&A period that `make -i’ can be used to force make to continue on errors.
Thanks to Mother Jones for hosting the event tonite.
Thanks for the nice writeup! One correction on the memory usage: we need 4GB of memory for about 400,000 tests, so it’s not quite so bad.