Nightly Builds?

Some software companies release 'nightly builds'. Does anyone sleep, and does anyone on here do that for 'fun'?

Steve411 wrote:

Some software companies release 'nightly builds'. Does anyone sleep, and does anyone on here do that for 'fun'?

usually the software is built automatically by utilities like NAnt or msbuild.
though, it might be some ppl at companies are awake untill 3 am to press ctrl-shift-b

I don't really get the point, why not build it in the morning. At 7 am, when everyone is awake.

If you hire someone in India you get free nightly builds without the hassle of automation

Steve411 wrote:

I don't really get the point, why not build it in the morning. At 7 am, when everyone is awake.

They can take a long time.  In a lot of places they also run a large ammount of tests against the build when its done.

Then in the morning you can come in a see how your build failed and the 500 auto tests did not run because of some new dev in the team

Maurits wrote:

If you hire someone in India you get free nightly builds without the hassle of automation

hahaha

We just employed a new developer at our company - but the wages here in norway are to high to pay overtime for nightly builds

Traditionally people would run an automated build at night just because that's when there were machines free to do it. With the cheap hardware we have now a lot of places dedicate machines to build constantly. The Mozilla project had a whole server farm and a software package called "Tinderbox" which would reapeatedly check out all the latest changes from CVS and run a build and then report. It had a machine for every supported platform and produced a web page were you could see which builds were broken at any time. Very useful.

The name "nightly build" still persists though as a matter of tradition. You'd only realease one build a day to keep the permutations down. When that build is actually made isn't too important, although a build performed at night is less likely to be broken because of incompete commits (although that shouldn't really happen if the automated build software is clever).

Steve411 wrote:

I don't really get the point, why not build it in the morning. At 7 am, when everyone is awake.

Because compiling Windows takes like 10 hours or something. There were some articles about the Windows build lab a few years ago, let me see if I can dig them up.

Sven Groot wrote:

Steve411 wrote: I don't really get the point, why not build it in the morning. At 7 am, when everyone is awake.

Because compiling Windows takes like 10 hours or something. There were some articles about the Windows build lab a few years ago, let me see if I can dig them up.

Wonder what the specs of those computers are. Mine freezes when compiling 14 megs of code... About 20 mins to finish.

Sven Groot wrote:

Because compiling Windows takes like 10 hours or something. There were some articles about the Windows build lab a few years ago, let me see if I can dig them up.

Hope you don't mind

WinSuperSite wrote:

Building the results of their work, compiling and linking it into the executable and other components that make up a Windows CD is a 12 to 13 hour process that is done every day of the week.

link

Thanks!

Stitch 2.0 wrote:

WinSuperSite wrote:Building the results of their work, compiling and linking it into the executable and other components that make up a Windows CD is a 12 to 13 hour process that is done every day of the week.

Yes... but consider that the same 'puter doesn't need to compile everything. Maybe 13 hour "total time".... in reality it would take a couple of minutes if you got a load of Cray computers to do it...

Besides, you don't need to compile Windows Media Player every time you build the shell.... unlike Internet Explorer

...Or have I just gone and jynxed it?

W3bbo wrote:

Yes... but consider that the same 'puter doesn't need to compile everything. Maybe 13 hour "total time".... in reality it would take a couple of minutes if you got a load of Cray computers to do it...

Yes, but that figure, those 12 or 13 hours is how long it takes to compile Windows in real time. That means that's the time it takes on whatever high-powered bunch of machines the Windows Build Lab has, which I'm sure is a very powerful setup.

Doesn't it go per-section? For example, one team builds the kernel, the next builds the add on apps.. etc.

Steve411 wrote:

Doesn't it go per-section? For example, one team builds the kernel, the next builds the add on apps.. etc.

They do that too for components which are not yet ready for the main Windows build.

Don't forget: It's not a build computer, it's a build lab. Compiling 40 GB of code does take 12-13 hours.