In the world of large scale software platform development, one of the basic platform attributes is build speed and a common question of capability is:
“How long does your build take?”
Experience shows this to be a loaded question with only one acceptable answer: 1 hour.
Anything higher and it may as well be 8 hours since it is not worth waiting during the day and can be put off overnight. Anything lower will raise suspicions and may lead to a full-day Agile workshop. So it was pleasing to note recently that we are now regularly building the Symbian platform in an hour(*).
Beyond just showing off, we’re excited about the ways in which we can build(!) on this capability to help the community:
- Promoting the great work of the Raptor team, owners of the sbs tool which we use as the basis of our builds – we expect to start doing “continuous integration” where any change to sbs triggers a platform build using the new version.
- Hosting builds on behalf of the platform contributor community – we expect to start doing this in support of the CompilerCompatibility branches
- Sharing of build times around the community and collaborating to drive community build speeds down – we look forwards to hearing about your experiences
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(*) Well, pretty close. See Andy Simpson’s build machinery page for the smallprint.
Thank you for this post! Relatively short but so informational.
I was just thinking that while some readers take pride in their technical knowledge and ask for more technical information on this blog – often criticizing the Symbian foundation and the Symbian platform with flame spirit and pure defeatism – this is one of those entries that should get technical readers pretty interested, and instead it hasn’t got any comments yet. The Symbian foundation is telling us that they can build the platform in an hour and point us to the places where we can find this information ourselves … and nobody says anything. Ah.
Just to be clear, I have an iPhone, an Android phone and a Symbian phone. But if I had to look at what happened in 2009 – globally – I think I can say without any doubt that Symbian has got me excited the most, that I’m looking forward to 2010 (S^3 and S^4!) and the amount of information (not just the code) the Symbian foundation is sharing in the spirit of openness with the community is way beyond what you’d expect from competitors.
[...] information can be had here: http://blog.symbian.org/2009/12/24/the-magic-hour/ This entry is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 [...]
[...] The PDK configurations are the ones that we use here in the Foundation to achieve the magic “build in one hour” – so you may find them [...]
[...] The PDK configurations are the ones that we use here in the Foundation to achieve the magic “build in one hour” – so you may find them [...]