What was done last week

• Got the nightly builds going with a cron job
• Got CVSSpam set up -- it sends emails when people commit to the CVS source code repository
• I generate source code coverage reports with EMMA

That's almost all of the things I wanted to do this week. I'm starting to get a better idea of what I can accomplish in a week in my free time and setting reasonable and attainable goals -- that's a Good Thing.

For open source projects working on a weekly time scale seems to work well, since you never know when you'll actually have free time. Any finer grain planning than that probably wouldn't work. For larger open source projects the smallest grain would probably be a month or more -- you never know when others will have free time either.

This week I made an AudioMan Release Engineering mailing list. I must stress that this mailing list is not for most people and volume will be relatively high. I'm still experimenting with tools that send emails to this list so there's a chance you may get extra emails from that as well.

Right now the build machine sends a check-in email to the releng mailing list every time someone makes a check-in. See this example of a check-in email, it's pretty neat. I will also be sending the results of every build to this mailing list as well. If that doesn't sound like your cup of tea, I wouldn't recommend joining the list.

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What got bumped?

• Email results of the build to the releng mailing list -- figure out why Ant's <mail> task isn't working
• Publish my sequence diagrams for Durham so that people can review them.
• Get a more stable build machine (hardware, not software) -- more on this later

New things to do

I'm going to spend the next week laying out just a bit of the basic UI for AudioMan in the Rich Client Platform (RCP) because I want to have the top end AudioMan projects there to make sure the project dependencies work with the build machine, which will be my main focus.

I was really impressed by what Andrew is doing with his build process. I hope he doesn't mind but I'm going to steal a few of his great ideas and incorporate them into AudioMan's build process. I hope to make building the project flexible for developers as well as rock-solid for the build machine -- and use as much of the same Ant code for both as possible.

Like I said last week, I really want to get the tools and the build system in place before I start doing major work on AudioMan. Then my development rhythym won't get tripped up because I have to fix a something major with the build machine. I want to get it to the it just works stage and be able to forget about it for long periods of time.

The most interesting part of the AudioMan build machine is building RCP plugin projects and how I've centralized all of the Ant code that does it. I'd like to write a document about how I do the Ant builds because I think it could save people some time -- and they would be free to use the code because it's under the EPL. I'm not sure how much easier my way is than Eclipse's PDE BUILD but it seems to me like it would be an alternative with a smaller learning curve.