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Build Tools and Process

January 12, 2011 10:05:36.379

It's one thing to come up with a few simple tools to automate a build - all things considered, that's not a terribly difficult thing (which begs the question: why hasn't the vendor of VW, Cincom, come up with something better than RTP?). The harder problem is fitting the technical siolution into the process that your project has evolved.

That's where I am today. I have a simple tool that reliably creates a build, using this set of steps:

  • Starting from a base image, load Store, then load the master application bundle
  • Do some baseline "cleanup" - close the various windows that got opened as part of the postLoad process, then save the image as a development snapshot
  • Fire up that saved image, unload a set of development packages, and then put it into a runtime state
  • Execute a perm save of the resulting image
  • Finally, fire up another image, load the image compression tools, and compress the saved runtime, yielding the final build.

All of that happens from a "driver" image - it's straightforward to launch a new image and hand it a command line argument to file in a script. That's the easy part though - now I need to get it integrated into the process, and that's the far more interesting piece of the project :)

posted by James Robertson

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